Trump asked his followers to vote on a new name for AI

President Donald Trump wants to retire the phrase artificial intelligence, and he put the replacement to a public vote.

The post

In a Truth Social post on Saturday, September 19, 2026, Trump wrote that “many people think that the words ‘Artificial Intelligence’ are inaccurate, and very ineloquent, relative to AI, or Artificial Intelligence.” He offered his followers three alternatives to choose from: Superior Intelligence, Extreme Intelligence and Supreme Intelligence. He described them as a more elegant and accurate description of the phenomenon.

The poll landed on the same day he said he is creating an “AI Force” modeled on the Space Force. He also teased the appointment of an AI czar, a post he said only high IQ individuals need apply for. Taken together, the posts amount to a day of branding for a technology he said he will “cherish,” “help” and “watch over.”

An old argument about a name

The debate over the term is older than the poll. “Artificial intelligence” was coined by John McCarthy in a 1955 proposal for a 1956 workshop at Dartmouth, and researchers have argued about it ever since.

The long-standing objection runs in the opposite direction from Trump’s. A common objection to the term is that it promises too much: the systems it describes are not intelligent in the way the word implies, and the label keeps suggesting capabilities the software does not have. Superior, Extreme or Supreme Intelligence would not resolve that complaint. Each of the three options moves the exaggeration further in the same direction.

Why a name is not cosmetic

Names do practical work in policy. What a technology is called shapes which committee regulates it, what the public expects from it and how much scrutiny it invites. A label built around superiority frames the technology as an asset to be accelerated. The existing label, for all its flaws, at least carries the word artificial, which reminds a reader that the system was built and can be examined.

The post did not say what would happen with the result of the vote. For now, the renaming exists only as a poll among the president’s followers, alongside an AI Force and an AI czar that are still announcements.