The power behind a name

“From this point forward, all of the United States documents, and hopefully the world’s, will be changed to use the much more accurate term super [intelligence], as opposed to artificial [intelligence].”

With that declaration before the United Nations General Assembly, Donald Trump gave artificial intelligence a new name: superintelligence, or SI.

The announcement came amid growing warnings over AI risks and intensifying competition with China, only days before Trump was due to meet Xi Jinping in Washington. With regulation, safety and technological leadership all under debate, changing the technology’s name was hardly the most obvious move.

Yet Trump wanted not only the United States, but eventually the world, to adopt it. Why?

The meaning of a name

Trump’s choice of “superintelligence” was more consequential than a simple substitution of terms. Artificial intelligence describes a broad category of machine-based systems, while superintelligence has traditionally meant intelligence that surpasses human capabilities.

The difference lies in what each word asks us to notice. “Artificial” describes origin. “Super,” by contrast, describes capability and hierarchy, shifting attention toward where machine intelligence stands in relation to human intelligence.

Trump made that distinction part of his argument, presenting “super” as a more accurate description than “artificial.” Yet superintelligence has generally referred to a possible future stage of AI development rather than to AI as a whole. Using it as the broader term collapses that distinction, placing current systems under a name associated with intelligence beyond the human level.

That raises a second question: who has the authority to decide what something should be called?

The authority to name

Languages have long developed their own names for foreign places, often through centuries of trade, migration, conquest and linguistic adaptation.

Türkiye challenged that convention directly. In 2022, Ankara formally asked the United Nations to replace “Turkey” with “Türkiye” in international usage, and the change became effective once the UN received the request.

Turkish officials framed the change as a matter of identity as well as language. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan argued that “Türkiye” better represented the country’s culture, civilisation and values, while his communications director Fahrettin Altun linked its international use to the country’s brand and its ability to define itself on its own terms.

“Türkiye” therefore rooted the country’s international identity more directly in its own language and in the historical continuity Ankara wanted the name to convey.

Naoero raises a related question with an added colonial dimension. President David Adeang argued that “Naoero” more faithfully represented the country’s heritage, language and identity, while describing “Nauru” as a form that emerged as the original name was altered by foreign speakers during a history shaped by colonial rule.

Both cases point toward a form of linguistic sovereignty: the claim that self-determination includes some authority over the name through which a country is recognised beyond its own borders.

But naming also shapes what survives over time. Once a name becomes established, it can determine which version of the past remains embedded in everyday language.

Names and collective memory

The dispute over Denali and Mount McKinley shows how a name can preserve one period of history long after the circumstances that produced it have passed.

Denali, an Indigenous Alaskan name, long predated “Mount McKinley,” which was introduced in 1896 by a prospector backing William McKinley. The federal government restored Denali in 2015 before Trump reversed the change in 2025 to honor McKinley’s legacy.

The choice between the two names also determines which history remains most visible. Denali preserves an Indigenous name that predates the United States, while Mount McKinley commemorates a president associated with a very different period of American history.

That ability of names to keep particular versions of the past visible is central to the idea of collective memory. Cultural-memory theorist Jan Assmann argued that societies preserve and transmit the past through external carriers such as texts, symbols, monuments and rituals. These allow collective memory to survive beyond individual experience and to be reproduced across generations.

Place names perform a similar function because they become embedded in ordinary life. Repeated on maps, signs and official documents and in everyday speech, they keep a historical reference present even when the story behind it is no longer widely known. Over time, that repetition can help preserve both the name and the historical narrative and identity attached to it.

Restoring an older name can therefore return an earlier historical reference to the institutions and everyday language through which a place is represented.

When names become concepts

The politics of naming extends well beyond proper names. Political events and historical periods are also placed into categories through the words used to describe them, and those categories can shape how the events themselves are understood.

A word such as “revolution” carries assumptions about rupture, legitimacy and historical change. Terms such as coup, uprising, reform or austerity similarly place an event inside a wider concept before its details are debated.

Those concepts are also not fixed. “Revolution,” for example, originally referred to circular movement, including the revolution of celestial bodies, and early political uses could similarly imply a return to an earlier order. By the time of the French Revolution, it had increasingly come to describe something almost opposite: a break with the existing order and the creation of something new.

That evolution captures the central idea behind German historian Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual history, or Begriffsgeschichte: political words accumulate meaning through historical experience. Their spelling may remain unchanged while the concepts attached to them shift with the societies using them.

The contrast is especially clear in the nineteenth-century encounter between China and the West. In Chinese historical memory, the period beginning with the Opium Wars became the “Century of Humiliation,” defined by military defeat, unequal treaties, foreign privileges and the loss of sovereignty. Western diplomatic thinking framed the same transformation very differently: as China’s entry into the “family of nations,” bringing it into a system of treaty relations, permanent diplomacy and international law dominated by European powers.

The two formulations place different experiences at the center of the same historical process. “Century of Humiliation” begins with what China was forced to surrender; “entry into the family of nations” begins with the international order it was being brought into. The terminology changes what the period appears to have been about.

The same principle applies when an event becomes a riot or an uprising, a coup or a revolution. The word establishes the conceptual ground on which the political argument begins.

Its power, however, ultimately depends on whether people beyond the institution that introduced it begin to use it.

The test for SI

Governments can change official terminology quickly. Whether “superintelligence” takes hold will depend on whether scientists, companies, media and eventually ordinary speakers adopt it beyond Washington.

For now, Trump can change what the United States writes. Whether he can change what the world says is another matter.