WASHINGTON, September 24 — The vocabulary of American diplomacy is being rewritten. The State Department has instructed diplomats in its international organizations bureau to strike the term “artificial intelligence” from official communications and replace it with “super intelligence,” following President Donald Trump’s rebranding push at the United Nations General Assembly this week. The order came in an email sent Tuesday to employees by Michael Drager, deputy assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of International Organization Affairs.
Titled “Change in Nomenclature AI to SI,” the message was obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday. “Following the president’s remarks at the GA today, please change all references of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ to ‘Super Intelligence’ in our documents and positions,” Drager wrote.
“We will be using ‘SI’ in all remarks, positions and press elements moving forward.”
A bureau with global reach
The instruction carries weight beyond Washington’s corridors. The Bureau of International Organization Affairs oversees U.S. diplomatic missions to every United Nations and multilateral agency worldwide — meaning the terminology shift touches American positions at bodies across the globe. It was not immediately clear whether other State Department bureaus had received or would follow similar guidance.
Nor was it clear on Wednesday whether comparable orders had been sent at other federal agencies. Trump announced the change during his address to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, telling world leaders he would “officially” rename the technology.
The president argued the existing label makes the technology seem fake. “The use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake and it is not fake. It’s actually amazing,” Trump said.
He added that “from the point forward” U.S. government documents “will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial. So it’s super intelligence.”
The AI Force question
One immediate consequence of the directive would likely be a rename of the “AI Force” that Trump announced over the weekend — which would become the “SI Force” under the new nomenclature. On Wednesday, U.S. representatives used the SI term at a U.N. Security Council meeting about AI, where tech executives urged the United Nations’ most powerful body to rein in the developing technology. AI’s rapid ascent has spurred growing international debate over how — and by whom — the technology should be governed.
Watch this space. The trend underneath is bigger than a name: Washington is now signalling that its entire diplomatic vocabulary on the technology will be rebuilt around the “super intelligence” framing, and the question is how far that language travels — through the rest of the State Department, across other agencies, and into the multilateral rooms where the rules for AI are being written.
