AI Gets a New Name, The Rules Stay the Same
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President Trump convened executives from leading AI companies and tech firms for a lunch Tuesday where they signed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence and he signed an executive order renaming artificial intelligence as “super intelligence.”
Executives from leading frontier labs OpenAI and Anthropic as well as Tesla, Nvidia, Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, AMD, and Palantir attended the lunch. Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, Nvidia, and XAI signed the Accord. It commits them to four layers of controls and audits. These include internal controls on training and deployment around cyber, biological, and chemical risk, plus unintended system access; internal teams to check those controls; independent external auditors; and board committees to receive the reports. The Accord carries no penalties for noncompliance, doesn't require companies to publish audit results, and gives the government no enforcement role. It says that over time "it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations." Trump called it "morally binding."
The executive order applies to correspondence, websites, reports, and other non-statutory documents, and states that the executive branch "will not acknowledge" the older terms for this technology. It defines SI as the same technologies covered by the statutory definition of AI. It also gives the President's science adviser 60 days to propose legislative language for a new federal definition.
Our take
The AI summit and rebranding are an attempt to quell growing anxiety among the American public over the negative externalities caused by the rapid development and deployment of AI. A CNN poll last week found 75% of Americans feel closer to fear than hope about AI. A UMass poll found fewer than one in four approves of Trump's handling of it. There is an existential fear that AI adoption will severely disrupt society, lead to mass layoffs, and could even end humanity.
These fears are at direct odds with the views of the White House and some senior AI executives, who view the race to develop AI as existential to the continued supremacy of the United States. But the lack of clear and coherent messaging increasingly places their views at the odds with the public. When it comes to change, fear of the worst often outweighs hope for the best, and that exact dynamic is playing out today.
Tuesday was a step forward toward changing the narrative, but far from a solution. There is just too much distrust in the government, labs, and technology companies for a renaming of AI and an agreement to self-regulate to reset the narrative. The more likely path toward shifting the narrative is going to come from AI introducing real benefits into everyday lives. And we are likely just at the beginning of that process.
Public perception is likely to shift as we enter a new period of adoption driven by increasingly sophisticated harnesses like Meta’s Muse, Instinct, and GrokBot. These products significantly enhance the average individual’s ability to use AI as more than just a chatbot, and as a personal assistant or chief of staff.
The regulatory path is murkier. Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness essay predicted company-level rules initially followed by state intervention in 2027 or 2028. The AI 2027 authors’ view is that Washington stays light-touch until recursive self-improvement, then intervenes directly. Tuesday’s meeting aligns with both scenarios, advancing light self-regulation and a questionable rebranding, but nothing that appears to materially stymie the current trajectory of AI development.
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