Artificial intelligence according to Trump: when a name becomes a matter of power

To understand who is in charge of American artificial intelligence, a seating plan is helpful. More specifically, the one Donald Trump published on Truth showing the seating arrangement for his ‘Super Intelligence Luncheon’ – the equivalent of an artificial intelligence wedding reception – pardon, ‘super’ – where no detail is left to chance. “To the right of the father”, the POTUS, sits Jensen Huang; to his left, Elon Musk. Opposite them is J. D. Vance, sandwiched between Jeff Bezos and the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. Next come Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai. Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic who has been calling for a more cautious approach for months, ends up further away than Pichai – a fact that has not gone unnoticed even by the Korean press, which, culturally speaking, is the quickest to ‘read the room’, as is required in such situations.

White House protocol has always spoken in terms of positions, and this time the message is crystal clear. At the centre sit those who, in the new gold rush, ‘sell the pickaxes’ – that is, those who manufacture silicon – alongside those who launch the rockets, whilst those who build the models and call for rules take their places further along the line.

The most interesting detail concerns two biographies. Huang was born in Taipei in 1963 and, at the age of nine, his parents sent him to a boarding school in Kentucky, where for years he cleaned toilets and played table tennis, before becoming the CEO of the company with the largest market capitalisation in economic history: could there possibly be a more American story than this? Lisa Su, who heads AMD and was seated a few places away, was born in Tainan and is related to him. The two great rivals in the artificial intelligence chip market come from the same family and the same island – the one that Beijing considers a province to be brought back under its control.

A few hours earlier, Trump had ruled out any cooperation with China on AI security. But the geography of the table serves as a reminder that American dominance rests on a supply chain that still runs through Asia – and more specifically through Hsinchu, where TSMC manufactures the chips designed by both Nvidia and AMD.

On a side note, the name has now been formalised. In an executive order, Trump has decreed that federal agencies are to refer to artificial intelligence as ‘Super Intelligence’, abbreviated to SI. The president’s reasoning is so disarmingly simple that it ends up being, as is often the case with the president, childish: ‘It isn’t artificial’. After all, Trump has shown a certain penchant for renaming things, from the Gulf of Mexico becoming the ‘American Gulf’ – just as happened with Lake Ontario – to the Department of Defence being renamed the ‘Department of War’: even in the anti-woke world, naming things is a form of conquest. In his vocabulary, everything is super, tremendous, incredible, enormous, and intelligence without superlatives would have sounded like a defeat. After the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’, all that was missing was ‘Big Beautiful Intelligence’ – the best ever seen.

The quip is, however, worth taking seriously. ‘Artificial’ comes from *ars* and *facere* and refers to something that has been skilfully crafted by someone. An artefact always has a creator, and that creator is also the one primarily responsible. Removing the adjective shifts technology from the realm of man-made objects to that of natural phenomena, alongside the weather and the tides: when faced with a hurricane, nobody asks who designed it.

The lunch concluded with an agreement that Trump described as ‘morally binding’ – a commitment to self-regulation signed by those who are supposed to be regulated – a decision which, according to the New York Times, conceals a precise political calculation: without federal rules, all responsibility for what happens will fall on the CEOs, as has already been the case with social media platforms. The new name fits well with this approach: if superintelligence is a force of nature, politics is left with nothing but the task of admiring it.

The word, after all, has a history. When Nick Bostrom popularised it in 2014, ‘superintelligence’ referred to a disturbing hypothesis: a mind capable of surpassing humankind in every field and evading human control. Twelve years later, the very same term appears on White House letterhead like a neon sign.

Scientific adviser Michael Kratsios is due to propose a legal definition shortly. In Europe, the AI Act will continue to refer to artificial intelligence systems, whilst both sides of the Atlantic will attempt to regulate the same thing in their own ways, using different names.