“We will be using ‘SI’ in all remarks, positions and press elements moving forward.” That line sits at the bottom of a short email, and it may be the quickest policy turnaround of the UN General Assembly week.
Michael Drager, a deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs, sent the message to staff on Tuesday. Its subject line read “Change in Nomenclature AI to SI.” The Associated Press got hold of it 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.
The email went out shortly after President Donald Trump spoke. In his address to the Assembly he said he would “officially” rename the technology, because the word artificial, in his view, makes it sound fake. “The use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake and it is not fake. It’s actually amazing,” he said. From that point on, he added, US government documents “will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial. So it’s super intelligence.”
Who is covered
Drager’s bureau runs American diplomatic missions to the United Nations and other multilateral agencies around the world, so the new wording reaches a lot of rooms. What it does not yet reach is clear. Nobody could say on Wednesday whether other State Department bureaus had been told to follow, or whether any other federal agency had received a similar order.
One knock-on effect looks likely. Trump announced an “AI Force” over the weekend, and under the new rule it would become the “SI Force.”
US representatives were already using the new term on Wednesday, at a Security Council meeting on AI. Technology executives at that session urged the council, the UN’s most powerful body, to put checks on a fast-moving technology.
The backdrop
Company chief executives, lawmakers and others have warned that AI could outrun human ability to control it, and those warnings have fed calls for global guardrails. Trump has taken the opposite line on oversight. He has said he does not want to hold the industry back and that America has to stay ahead of China. In a social media post on Monday he said he was “not going to stifle Growth, of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution, or the Internet, itself.”
The vocabulary is likely to come up again soon. AI is expected to be a major topic when Trump hosts Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Washington from Wednesday.
