What’s in a name? What China and Trump call AI reveals how they see its future
Oct 11, 2026
US President Donald Trump wants to banish the word “artificial” from artificial intelligence, saying it makes one of the world’s most consequential technologies sound “fake”.
Across the Pacific, however, China’s name for the technology has long carried a different connotation – one that places humans, rather than artificiality, at its centre.
Trump last week signed an executive order directing US federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence”, or AI, with “Super Intelligence”, or SI, in...