Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that Xi Jinping agreed with him. "Artificial Intelligence" should be called "Super Intelligence" because it better describes what it actually is. The conversation took place during a White House meeting as part of Xi's three-day visit to the United States. It was the second encounter between the two leaders in less than six months. The statement has that tone of anecdote that later becomes state policy.
Changing the label is an exercise of power because it rewrites perception without touching the mechanics: renaming artificial intelligence as super intelligence alters how the phenomenon is seen without modifying a single byte of the underlying code. It's like when political correctness prevents things from being called by their name. Over time those things stop representing what they actually are, with all their real characteristics. A semantic adjustment doesn't alter a single parameter of any model. It doesn't change how it's trained, what data it consumes, or who owns the servers. It does change, however, how people perceive it. And that's where the power lies.
This kind of maneuver feels familiar to those of us who follow the fight over tech vocabulary. Jensen Huang, of Nvidia, recently redefined AGI. He turned it from a cognitive milestone into an economic value generator, moving the goalposts to suit his interests. Trump and Xi are doing something parallel, but at the scale of nations. If "Artificial" sounds like a limited tool and "Super" evokes inevitable force, then the public conversation stops being about regulation. It becomes surrender to what's coming.
Why does the name we assign to a technology carry so much weight? Language works as the interface between power and public perception. Renaming a failed project, from restructuring to optimization or from cutback to efficiency, doesn't fix the original problem. It changes who can question the decision and with what words. The same thing happens with AI. Only the scale is planetary and the actors are presidents instead of managers.
What exactly do they gain from this relabeling? Xi didn't stop at nomenclature. He called for continuous dialogue between the United States and China to manage the risks and benefits of AI. He insisted it must remain under human control. He also pressed Trump for the United States to oppose Taiwanese independence and spoke of each nation leveraging its strengths for joint development. All of this followed a dinner with tech executives. That reveals who really occupied the seats even if they don't appear in the official photo.
The real decisions about AI regulation are still happening behind closed doors. While public language focuses on whether the name sounds more precise or more powerful, tariffs, semiconductors, export controls, and the future of Taiwan are being negotiated. The label is the curtain. Behind it, the interests that actually have material consequences keep moving.
Though I'm no professional historian, the records of the American and French revolutions show the same playbook. They used the rhetoric of liberation to justify new forms of domination and spoke of rights while protecting privileges. In The Generosity in the Doorway it's traced how that approach was later reused during the Industrial Revolution. Extraction was sold as progress and control was disguised as freedom. Calling what used to be artificial intelligence "super intelligence" follows that same pattern. The new word sounds like advancement. The power structure, who owns the models, who decides their military use, who benefits from chip scarcity, stays exactly the same.
Trump needs it to sound inevitable to justify massive investment and accelerated deregulation. Competing with China demands urgency. Xi gets something different. By introducing the idea of human control into official American vocabulary, he positions Beijing as the reasonable moderator against a West that, in this narrative, runs without brakes. Both use the same label for opposite agendas. That's not a contradiction. It's the normal use of language once it becomes a weapon.
The engineers who train these systems are left out. So are the workers whose jobs depend on how their deployment is regulated, and the citizens of both countries. None of them voted for this semantic agreement or were consulted. The question of who writes the rules of AI resurfaces here with force. While the public debate focuses on nomenclature, the companies and governments that build and fund these systems keep setting the real rules without effective oversight.
This habit of renaming things to shield them from scrutiny isn't unique to AI. In France, when digital censorship lost legitimacy, the government didn't eliminate it. It rebranded it as combating hate speech online and outsourced it to organizations that appear independent but depend on state funding. Trump and Xi applied the same recipe on a bilateral scale. Neither probably thinks of it as deliberate manipulation. Power has always operated this way with words.
I still don't have a clear sense of how much of this translates into concrete policy and how much is diplomatic theater. It's possible that in a few months no one will remember the super intelligence episode and that the technical label will remain unchanged in serious regulatory documents. It's also possible that this version seeps into speeches, legislation, and how the next round of compute infrastructure investments gets justified. The ambiguity isn't a flaw in the analysis. It reflects how much of international politics gets decided in meetings we never see in full.
We should be suspicious every time a name change arrives accompanied by silence about the underlying power structure. If "super intelligence" truly indicated a new architecture or a qualitatively different capability, it would make technical sense. That wasn't the case in that meeting. What was discussed was perception, Taiwan, and bilateral balances. The name changed because it fit the political conversation of the moment, not because the technology's nature had changed.
Who ultimately decides whether this super intelligence ends up serving humanity or simply concentrates more power in the same hands that already hold it?
