Trump renames AI, but new labels will not fix power grid strains
By Nikhil Raghavan · Reporting from San Francisco ·
Donald Trump announced a rebrand of artificial intelligence to super intelligence at the UNGA, but changing words cannot solve power bottlenecks or build unconstrained infrastructure.
Changing the label does not fix the latency or pay the power bill
President Donald Trump spoke on Tuesday at the United Nations General Assembly. The United States will officially refer to artificial intelligence as “super intelligence,” according to reporting by washingtonpost.com and Free Malaysia Today. He stated that the word “artificial” undersold the technology. He added that “super intelligence” “sounds much better” and “it’s much more accurate.”
This is linguistic sleight of hand designed to replace a technical reality with a marketing slogan. As Axios reported, the administration is also forming an “AI Force” modeled on the Space Force. It is scrambling for an AI czar to spearhead the rebranding effort.
The mechanism here is simple. When you cannot solve an engineering bottleneck or agree on a safety framework, you change the dictionary.
The prompt for this rebrand came via X and Truth Social. The White House polled the public there on alternative names. But administrative decrees do not rewrite underlying infrastructure constraints.
Executive Order 14421 was signed on August 26, 2026. As noted in the order, the rapid growth of data centers and artificial intelligence has created an extraordinary demand for reliable electricity. Proclamation 11052, signed under the Trade Expansion Act, sets minimum import prices for solar-grade polysilicon. It imposes an ad valorem duty on downstream derivatives to support domestic innovations.
The administration is pushing a multitrillion-dollar infrastructure buildout while rejecting globalist safety schemes. To understand why, look at the supply chain. You cannot run a frontier model on a rebranding press release. You need gigawatts of power and millions of square feet of cooled real estate. You also need transformers that do not violate national emergency restrictions.
The global scramble for control and the fantasy of a military-style bureau
The strongest opposing case for this approach comes from the international coalition that gathered in New York. Leaders of more than 20 mostly European countries urged binding safety measures for advanced AI. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for the US and China to start a dialogue. He urged engagement similar to US-Soviet talks during the Cold War.
French President Emmanuel Macron warned against becoming a vassal of any great power. He proposed pooling investments to build an open-source AI model. Prime Minister Andy Burnham plans to use Britain’s role as host of the Group of 20 next year. He wants to push for a single set of global standards.
This argument has intellectual coherence. It treats the technology as a global commons requiring multilateral guardrails to prevent catastrophic harms. This echoes past nuclear non-proliferation efforts.
Yet this view collapses when mapped onto reality. The United States and China did not endorse binding safety measures. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic chief Dario Amodei, and Hugging Face co-founder Clement Delangue addressed the UN Security Council. They spoke while diplomats bickered over definitions.
A global treaty cannot be enforced without inspecting the weights of training clusters. No sovereign state will permit foreign engineers inside its most sensitive data centers. The European push for pooled open-source models ignores the sheer capital expenditure required to train a frontier system.
Trump’s alternative—an “AI Force” modeled on the Space Force—is equally unworkable as an operational command. Creating a dedicated military-style organizational structure to institutionalize a technology as a national security imperative sounds decisive on a podium.
Federal agencies currently possess a meager headcount dedicated solely to machine learning oversight. A cluster-wide failure will eventually happen at three in the morning. An “AI Force” patch will not debug a distributed training run or clear a bottleneck in the power substation.
The historical pattern of rejecting international frameworks
This renaming effort follows a well-worn playbook of administrative nationalism. Last year, the Trump administration changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” via executive order. In August, it renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America” during a trade dispute with Canada, as reported by Free Malaysia Today.
This mirrors past rejections of multilateral oversight. It matches the United States withdrawal from the Paris Agreement between 2017 and 2021. That was a rejection of globalist regulatory frameworks in favor of national economic primacy.
At the UNGA, Donald Trump gave his verdict: “The United States totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control… artificial intelligence.” He dismissed advocates of safety regulations as “doomers.” He said they previously claimed we would all be dead in 12 years because of global warming.
Executive Order 14409 was signed on June 2, 2026. It explicitly bars mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance, or permitting requirements for frontier models. The administration wants growth without friction, investment without inspection, and dominance without bureaucracy.
Yet reality has a stubborn way of asserting itself through the power grid and the supply chain. You can declare artificial intelligence to be super intelligence by executive fiat. But electrons still must flow through transformers that are restricted by national emergency orders.
When an AI czar takes office, they will inherit a grid on the verge of strain. They will face a fractured international dialogue. These safety debates cannot be legislated out of existence by renaming the noun.
Sources
- washingtonpost.com: Trump says he’s renaming AI to ‘super intelligence’
- Axios: Trump wants an "AI Force" to fight "doomers" — and a scramble for AI czar is underway.
- Free Malaysia Today: Trump renames AI ‘super intelligence’ as leaders jostle over dangers
- Times of India: 'AI is amazing, want to name it 'super intelligence': Trump at UNGA