After weeks of national discourse about the threat of AI, President Donald Trump had a unique opportunity to influence AI safety globally in recent days. Trump hosted Chinese leader Xi Jinping and tech oligarchs who are building AI, like Elon Musk and Sam Altman, for a state dinner on Thursday. But rather than sitting them all down and hashing out some important AI safeguards, Trump decided the only thing necessary for AI safety was a president with a high IQ.
Also, he insisted on renaming AI for some reason.
Trump recently picked up an obsessive interest in renaming artificial intelligence recently, putting the question of what to call AI to his followers on social media. After several polls and revisions, the winner was Super Intelligence (SI), and the president has told people that’s what they should call it.
Sebastian Gorka, one of Trump’s neo-fascist advisors, even scolded Newsmax anchor Ed Henry this week after he used the phrase “AI race” to describe the geopolitical battle with China. Gorka said, “Sorry. It’s SI. As of this week, it’s Super Intelligence.” Henry thanks Gorka for the reminder that he should follow the language dictated by Dear Leader Trump.
It all seems like a stupid distraction and it is. But Trump is dead serious. He gets a certain thrill from being able to dictate language, as we’ve seen with his renaming of Lake Ontario to Lake America, the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and the Department of Defense to the Department of War.
AI policy isn’t something that he wants to think too hard about, beyond taking credit for its impact on the stock market. And if you suggest to Trump that maybe he should take some of the concerns about AI seriously, he’ll just make it about himself in the weirdest way possible.
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sept. 14.
Trump has claimed that he’ll appoint an AI czar, but it’s unclear who that might be. David Sacks was the old AI czar, but he left government because he’d hit the maximum time limit for a Special Government Employee (SGE). SGEs are allowed to serve a limited number of days without going through a more thorough vetting of their financial disclosures and potential conflicts of interest.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was rumored to be up for the role of AI czar, and on Sunday said there would be a “notification mechanism” set up between the U.S. and China for any incidents involving AI that might involve national security. Why would the Treasury Secretary be the one proposing this? That part wasn’t clear. But there were enough people speculating that Bessent was in line for the AI czar job that Trump himself posted to Truth Social denying the rumors.
It’s unclear what the status of the “notification mechanism” might be, since neither Trump nor Xi revealed anything specific about their possible AI discussions. But it’s very likely they talked about it, given the amount of money at play. Xi did broadly acknowledge there were important technological safeguards to consider when he spoke in the White House on Thursday.
“Both China and the United States are leading nations in artificial intelligence,” Xi said, according to the Washington Post. “We have both the capability and responsibility to develop and manage AI for good, and ensure that the development of AI is always under human control and serves the well-being of the people.”
Trump is reportedly holding an event at the White House next Tuesday that will focus on AI. It’s being billed as a “golden age” event where a new website will be launched called America.gov. What will the website do? An anonymous White House official told Fox News it will be “a new front door for the federal government that will provide a one-stop shop for Americans looking for information and resources from the federal government that are currently spread over a maze of various agency websites.”
The event will include Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Dr. Mehmet Oz, and Joe Gebbia, the Airbnb co-founder who now leads the National Design Studio, according to Fox. Also in attendance will be Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Elon Musk, among other oligarchs. Musk, of course, is the guy who decimated the U.S. federal government last year as the SGE leading DOGE, before leaving in a huff while explicitly stating Trump was in the Epstein files.
Trump and Musk have made up, but anytime you hear that Musk is going to be leading a government initiative, you can bet things are going to go really poorly. Let’s just hope America.gov doesn’t go full MechaHitler.
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