AI is now ‘super intelligence,’ but federal oversight is still missing

Thomas Faull via Getty ImagesPresident Trump’s decision to officially change how government officials refer to AI to "super intelligence" is an effort to respond to the latest push for federal oversight of AI systems. With the name change and a new agreement with AI leaders, Trump appears to be signaling that federal oversight is not coming.In his executive order on Sept. 29, the president wrote that “super intelligence more appropriately captures the promise, potential, and rapidly advancing capabilities of these technologies.” Trump informally mentioned his plan to change the name during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 22.“It seems to be a part of a playbook that this administration has turned to on several occasions,” said Michael Bennett, associate vice chancellor for data and AI strategy at the University of Illinois Chicago, referring to other instances in which the president has changed a traditional name. For example, he changed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.Related:AI industry copes with out-of-control agents. Here’s OpenAI’s responseNo slowdownThe president also appears to be responding to heightened AI safety concerns in the tech industry and to Americans' anxieties about AI technology as the election season nears. Recently, generative AI vendors such as Anthropic and OpenAI have called for a slowdown after agents powered by their models attacked infrastructure or left testing sandbox environments. Meanwhile, Trump has sided with AI chipmaker Nvidia, saying there is no need for a collective slowdown.Therefore, the name change might help ease anxieties and concerns among those who disagree with the president.“This should also be read as an effort to show the American people that the administration is trying to do something,” Bennett said. “The signal seems to be ‘we’re not just sitting on our hands.’ It’s a signal about the preferred approach to governance. This is a kind of marketing style approach to titling or describing self-regulation.”The push for self-regulation was also evident after the president revealed on Tuesday, following his dinner with leaders of Meta, OpenAI, XAI, Nvidia, Anthropic and others, that the vendors had signed a joint agreement in which each company is responsible for governing its own technology.The agreement calls on each vendor to implement four layers of controls and audits, including partnering with an independent external auditor or evaluator and designating an independent committee of the board of directors to oversee the controls and receive reports from the teams operating them.Related:Microsoft’s Copilot redesign provides an experimental opportunityU.S. and China“What the President is doing is he is saying we are going to double down and support American technology, and nothing is going to stop us on that,” said Harjiv Singh, founder of AI vendors Gutenberg and CambrianEdge.ai.He added that this is also about the geopolitical battle -- including trade disputes and the race for AI supremacy -- between the U.S. and China.“The changing of names domestically may not do much, but at an international level, it carries a lot of weight, how people and other countries see this,” Singh said. The AI race “is an important driver of why the President believes the U.S. should not lose ground on that.”Moreover, the name change aligns with AI vendors’ positioning of the technology, said Bradley Shimmin, an analyst at Futurum Group.“That falls in line with the messaging that we’ve been getting from the tech vendor community,” Shimmin said. “Have they not been pitching artificial general intelligence, a form of superintelligence, for quite some time now? This has been their goal.”Esther Shittu is an Informa TechTarget news writer and podcast host covering AI software and systems.About the AuthorNews Writer, AI BusinessEsther Shittu has covered AI technologies and industry trends since 2021. As co-host of the Targeting AI podcast, she talks with experts, thought leaders and practitioners exploring critical AI developments. Before AI Business, she wrote for SearchEnterpriseAI, the New York Daily News, Bklyner and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. When she's not diving deep into the world of AI, she spends her time on passion projects and raising her three daughters.