The key to success, in many situations, is to call the whole operation something else. [...]
Concretely, say we are on a bus called ‘the economy and AI progress and beating China’ or whatever that will blow up if we go below 50 miles an hour, but also we are currently hitting the gas so fast we are now going 100 miles an hour on pace for 200+. Both sides can get what they want at the same time. [...]
Artificial Intelligence
The other supposed agreement was a distinct executive order to change the name of AI to [AI], which Trump claims the lab leaders signed off on. I’m sorry I have this tick, I try to type [artificial intelligence] and instead I end up with brackets.
Andrew Curran: President Trump ‘We’re going to be signing a document today at about five o’clock, renaming Artificial Intelligence, because it’s not artificial, we all agree on that, and we’re going to be renaming it [Artificial Intelligence]. Officially renaming it.’I am very curious if Trump plans to now get mad every time Dario or Altman or Musk says the words ‘artificial intelligence.’
So why would Trump go this hard on something like this?
The obvious explanation is this is Vintage Trump. He’s all about renaming things, and finding nicknames, and invoking vibes. He has a been a world class vibe invoker, nicknamer and term associator, especially in the 2016 election. If you think he chose the most annoying possible name due to namespace clashes, it’s probably because he was optimizing for that on some level. There is method to the madness.
You can also see it as a ‘bend the knee’ moment, the way various regimes and cultures often insist people affirm absurdist things. If you can get the makers of AI to start calling it [AI] instead, in a sense you own them. They have shown loyalty. And this is a way of weeding out those who won’t play along. Will Dario say AI or [AI]?
Money, Dear Boy
There is also an alternative explanation that is dumb and corrupt even for 2026, that has been put forward by Adam Cochran. As additional suggestive evidence, two of the three alternative options for the renaming that were in Trump’s initial poll, and both of the final two after he restarted it under false pretenses, started with S.
As counterpoints, the term ‘superintelligence’ was already being used as marketing by Meta and talked about by others, so these investments were smart anyway, and the timing would mean that this was a plan months in the making, which would not be Trump’s style, and would be in conflict with this looking strongly like a reaction to the HuggingFace incident and Pacing the Frontier.
Is it possible that this is part of the motivation for the renaming drive? Of course, yes, we absolutely live in a timeline roughly this dumb.
My strong presumption, however, is that primary causation runs the other way. Any insider trading is mostly a free action given plans that exist for other reasons, rather than a driving force causing the changes. I don’t like it, but I am not that mad about it.
Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth): SCOOP: Trump’s “Super Intelligence” Scandal:
I believe Trump’s “SI” Executive Order was ANOTHER criminal plot to enrich the Trump family. Insiders seem to have profited MILLIONS off of .si domain names before his Truth Social posts.
It’s no surprise that .AI domain names are a hot commodity and almost all taken by squatters. But what wasn’t?
.si domain names. .si is the domain extension of Slovenia (coincidentally where Melania and Barron Trump are both citizens of)
On September 19th Trump made a random Truth Social post about renaming “Artificial Intelligence” to “Super Intelligence” without any clear reason.
This set off a flurry of people buying and registering .si names related to AI. But it wasn’t the first time… The .si registry has around 55/day registrations in 2023-2025, but in 2026 the numbers started to pick up. On June 24th they saw more than 400 in a single day.
This volume spiked with more than ***7000*** new domains registered in July. And a sudden flurry of buying .si domains in the aftermarket. AI related .si names started going for tens of thousands of dollars.
… Since Trump’s announcement .si domain have seen *MILLIONS* of dollars in turn over. Much of it going to domains that were registered in the last 60 days before the announcement.
TL;DR:
-Trump made the SI executive order to try and force companies to brand as “SI” instead of “AI”
-In the past 60 days insiders bought thousands of .si domain names
-They’ve profited hundreds of millions of dollars so far.
by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAV | Read more:
Image: Seating chart, uncredited
***
One can’t help but see this as the ultimate presidential flex—for all the executives’ trillions of dollars and all their actual intelligence, the alpha in the room was the guy with the orange skin. Changing a name might seem like a minor matter compared to the enormity of constraining a potentially catastrophic technology. But to this crowd, artificial intelligence is much more than a bunch of letters strung together. It’s their foundation. Their identity. When they were kids reading science fiction books under the covers, the term ignited their imaginations. They built or transformed their companies in service of AI, and it's just about all they’ve talked about for the past four years.Yet when the president used his lunch soiree to win their approval for his wacky idea to undo 70 years of history, apparently not a single person in the room expressed an objection. Not Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Greg Brockman, Alex Karp, or Elon Musk.
Jacob Weisberg, author of the recent book Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era, views the episode as a classic Trump loyalty test, meant to assess if otherwise powerful people will demean themselves to curry the president’s favor and avoid his wrath. If you pass the loyalty test, you fail the backbone test. “The only way to resist this kind of thing is by acting collectively,” says Weisberg. “If all of those guys had just said, ‘We'll agree to the terms of the self-regulation, but we don't accept [the name change], what would he have done?” [...]
My bet is that they will do the minimum to avoid presidential ire while trying to run out the clock until the next administration puts this bizarre idea out of its misery. It’s been suggested that the executives actually welcome a rebranding of what has become a toxic term. I’m skeptical of that, especially since the president’s mandated replacement, “super intelligence,” is a hell of a lot scarier than the original term.
From a scientific perspective the change also makes no sense. No less an expert than Nick Bostrom, the philosopher who popularized the term superintelligence in an eponymous book, seems baffled by the idea. Superintelligence, he explained to me in an email, “refers specifically to systems that greatly surpass all the best human brains. ‘AI’ has referred to a much broader category of systems, which includes, for example, email spam filters, spell checkers, simple navigation systems, early LLMs, and the chess engines of the ’70s that didn’t yet match the best human chess players. It seems awkward to refer to these as ‘superintelligent.’”
