Three days after President Trump signed an executive order renaming "artificial intelligence" to "Super Intelligence" across the federal government, the mockery is rolling in — including from his own camp. Tech industry insiders are openly ridiculing the rebrand, and even Natalie Winters, the far-right correspondent from Steve Bannon's War Room, complained: "Hammering 'Super Intelligence' and playing all those games is not what people voted for."
Trump had boasted at the White House that the name change was agreed to by "the biggest, the smartest, the greatest people anywhere in the world." The reality is messier. Elon Musk posted "Super Intelligence" on X and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang issued a statement using the term three times — polite applause. But Meta would only say Mark Zuckerberg "sometimes" uses "superintelligence" — a different term with a different meaning — while OpenAI, Anthropic and Google didn't respond at all. Axios summed up the real motive: Trump and the CEOs want to shed AI's "toxic branding," as polls show Americans growing anxious about AI's rapid advance and Trump's numbers on the issue sinking.
On September 29, the day before the order, Trump hosted Musk, Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Huang, Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI president Greg Brockman at a White House lunch, where they signed the roughly 300-word White House Accord on Super Intelligence. It contains four voluntary safety commitments: internal safety checks, dedicated monitoring teams, external assessments, and board-level independent oversight committees. Trump called it "morally binding," "almost like a constitution" — though it carries no legal force and no penalties.
The lunch also produced an infrastructure ask: Trump told the companies to work with local communities before building data centers, and to contribute to local needs like schools, teachers and infrastructure. Data centers are AI's power plants, and community tensions are already flaring as demand for computing and electricity surges.
One footnote: the accord Trump praised so lavishly misspelled "United States" as "Unites States" beneath his signature.
California Governor Gavin Newsom's counterpunch was swift. On October 1, he signed 13 AI-related bills, headlined by the first-in-the-nation No Robo Bosses Act of 2026: employers may no longer rely solely on AI-powered automated decision systems to fire or discipline workers; where such systems drive the decision, a human reviewer must corroborate it with other information like manager and peer evaluations. The rest of the package covers AI-driven layoffs, workplace surveillance, deepfakes, medical AI and lawyers' use of the technology.
For good measure, Newsom signed an executive order requiring California state agencies to keep calling it "artificial intelligence" — a direct jab at Trump's rebrand.
Public Citizen unearthed an telling number: tech executives at the White House roundtable have donated more than $200 million to Trump's political operation. Political donations in hard cash on one side, a "morally binding" voluntary pledge on the other — no wonder critics call the "Super Intelligence" spectacle a show where the rebrand is the cheapest prop.
For now, the rename touches only federal paperwork and websites — not consumer products, services, or the legal definition of AI in statutes. But two things matter for Chinese Americans in the U.S.: California's No Robo Bosses Act is the nation's first limit on the "AI boss," directly protecting tech workers from being fired by algorithm alone; and AI regulation is becoming a federal-versus-California tug of war, meaning tech professionals must watch two rulebooks. Whether "Super Intelligence" ever makes it into federal law depends on the answer science advisor Michael Kratsios owes within 60 days.