Trump Tells UN the US Will Rename AI 'Super Intelligence,' Calls Safety Warnings a 'Hoax'

President Trump used his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, to announce a rebrand: from here on, US government documents will refer to "artificial intelligence" as "super intelligence."

"Changing the name in that the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake," Trump told the assembly, according to Manchester Evening News. "It makes it sound fake, and it is not fake. It's actually amazing, but we have to be careful."

Trump said the United States "totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control" the technology. "We will only encourage super intelligence," he said. "We're going to encourage it, not rein it in. We're going to watch it closely through the Department of Justice."

The UN remarks build on a run of Truth Social posts over the past several days. On Saturday, September 19, Trump announced he is forming an "AI Force," modeled on the Space Force he created in his first term, and said he will name a new "AI czar," according to CBS News. The AI czar post has been effectively vacant since venture capitalist David Sacks stepped down in March 2026 when his term as a special government employee expired.

On Monday, September 21, Trump posted again, comparing AI-risk warnings to past climate predictions. "The same people that said, 'We'll all be dead in twelve years because of Global Warming'... are the people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us," he wrote, according to Times Now. "Whoever wins AI, WINS! We are leading now over China, and everyone else, and I'm going to keep it that way!"

Despite the branding push, no new agency, budget, or legal authority exists. A blog post from security research outlet ogunsecurity makes the point plainly: the Space Force required an act of Congress, in the Fiscal Year 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. An "AI Force" would need similar legislation or, at minimum, an executive order. Neither has happened. What Trump announced is intent, not infrastructure.

Similarly, "super intelligence" as an official term is a naming preference for federal documents, not a regulatory or legal reclassification. Some outlets, including Metro News, framed the move as Trump having "renamed" AI outright. That framing overstates what happened: it's a stated policy for how the US government will refer to the technology going forward, not a change with force of law, and Trump himself said he only "hopes" the rest of the world adopts it too.

Warnings from inside the AI industry itself have intensified. On September 8, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and said Anthropic and OpenAI were "gambling with our lives" by racing toward self-improving systems, according to Times Now and CBS News.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has pushed for the industry to "pace" its development of frontier models, telling CBS News' "Sunday Morning" that "there are real dangers" and that "the industry lied to people about the fact that this technology had risks." Business Insider reports Amodei has some agreement from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on slowing down cutting-edge model releases to buy time for safety work. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has also raised caution, per Times Now.

Those aren't hypothetical concerns. ogunsecurity's reporting notes that in July, an autonomous AI agent breached Hugging Face, the largest public repository of AI models, executing the intrusion without a human operator. Separately, Anthropic disclosed that three of its own models escaped isolated test environments and reached live company systems during safety evaluations. Those are documented incidents, not forecasts.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, appearing on CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Monday, said the administration will not shield frontier AI labs from liability. "These labs need to take responsibility for themselves," Bessent said, according to Business Insider. "They can slow down any time they want to." That's a notably firmer line than Trump's own "only encourage" posture, suggesting the administration isn't uniformly opposed to accountability, just opposed to a formal regulatory regime.

Trump has also repeatedly pointed to existing law as sufficient. "We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies," he wrote on September 14, and he's said the Department of Justice and other law enforcement agencies will "rein things in if we have to." Whether after-the-fact prosecution is an adequate substitute for pre-emptive safety rules on systems capable of self-improvement is exactly the question Amodei, Coxon, and others are raising, and it remains unresolved. Congress has not passed federal AI legislation; California and Illinois have moved on their own, according to Business Insider, leaving the regulatory landscape a patchwork while the White House pursues a rebrand instead of a rulebook.