53% of Americans Reject Trump's 'Super Intelligence' Rebrand

By Daniel Rao

Photo: President Donald Trump, who ordered federal agencies to replace "artificial intelligence" with "Super Intelligence." (Official White House portrait by Daniel Torok, public domain)

Donald Trump has spent the last two weeks trying to rename artificial intelligence. The American public has now voted on the idea, and the result is about as subtle as a brick through a window: 53% want to keep saying "artificial intelligence," and only 9% want "super intelligence."

That is the finding of a YouGov poll reported by Axios on Thursday — and it lands like a bucket of cold water on one of the strangest branding campaigns in the history of American technology policy. The president signed an executive order. He strong-armed the biggest tech CEOs on the planet into a signing ceremony. He got Nvidia's Jensen Huang calling data centres "super intelligence factories." And the country's answer, by a margin of nearly six to one, is: no thanks, we'll stick with AI.

Rebrands work when the product changes. This one is an attempt to change the conversation without changing anything else — and the poll suggests the public can tell the difference.

The poll that killed the rebrand

According to Axios, the YouGov survey asked Americans which term they prefer. Fifty-three per cent chose "artificial intelligence." Nine per cent chose "super intelligence." The rest presumably chose neither, both, or couldn't be bothered — which, given the options, is understandable.

We searched YouGov's public survey archive for the poll's toplines and found nothing published yet — Axios is the sole named source for the 53-to-9 margin, and Newsmax's write-up of the Axios story matches it number for number.

It is worth pausing on how lopsided this is. In polling terms, 53-to-9 is not a disagreement; it is a rout. Presidential approval ratings move on margins a tenth of this size. For a branding campaign backed by the White House and the most valuable companies in the world, single digits is not a slow start. It is a verdict.

How we got here: from online poll to executive order

The rebrand did not begin in a boardroom. According to Gizmodo's account of the saga, it began on 19 September with an online poll, in which Trump let the internet vote on a new name for AI. Three days later he landed on "Super Intelligence" — a term that, Gizmodo notes dryly, wasn't even an option in the original poll.

What followed was a full-court press. Trump ordered diplomats to use the new term and claimed he had persuaded Chinese president Xi Jinping to say it too. Then, on Tuesday 29 September, after a White House summit with executives from Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI and Nvidia, he signed an executive order directing federal agencies, "to the maximum extent permitted by law," to use "Super Intelligence" and "SI" instead of "artificial intelligence" and "AI" in official communications and nonstatutory documents.

The same day, he gathered those executives in the East Room to sign the "morally binding" White House Accord on Super Intelligence — the voluntary pact we covered earlier this week — capping a day that also included the 31-titan Super Intelligence luncheon where the industry's safety split was on full display.

Trump's own argument for the rename is linguistic. He has said the word "artificial" makes the technology sound fake — even though, he says, "it is not fake." At the White House summit, he went further: "That's not a hoax. In fact, it's the exact opposite."

The order also starts a bureaucratic clock: the assistant to the president for science and technology gets 60 days to submit proposed legislative language establishing a federal definition of "Super Intelligence," assessing whether it should modify or replace the existing statutory definition of AI. For now, the order defines SI as covering the same technologies the law already calls AI — which is to say, the name changes and nothing else does.

Why they're really doing it

Axios is admirably direct about the motive. The rebrand, it reports, reflects worry among political and technology leaders that public backlash over AI's environmental impact and potential workforce displacement could slow the industry's development. Communities across the country have built bipartisan coalitions against massive data centres, citing energy consumption and environmental damage. Younger workers are sounding the alarm about jobs.

And then Axios delivers the line that gives the whole game away: tech leaders view the terminology shift as part of addressing these concerns without substantively changing their business practices.

Read that again. The industry's plan for dealing with the backlash over data centres devouring farmland and power grids, and over AI systems displacing workers, is not to build cleaner data centres or slow the displacement. It is to call the thing a nicer name and hope nobody notices. This is not a strategy. It is a euphemism with a marketing budget.

Photo: The White House, where the "Super Intelligence" rebrand was launched at a September summit with tech executives. (Matt H. Wade, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

The executives' private shrug

The most telling details in the Axios reporting are not the poll numbers. They are the executives' body language.

Some executives told Axios their companies plan to adopt the new terminology when dealing with the Trump administration and federal agencies — while freely admitting they don't expect it to spread into mainstream discourse. That is Washington-speak for: we'll say it to his face and never use it again.

Elon Musk, never one for subtlety, was caught on the record doing exactly that dance: speaking at the summit, he caught himself midspeech and switched to the new terminology. It is hard to think of a more perfect image of the whole enterprise — the world's richest man correcting himself in real time, performing enthusiasm he clearly does not feel.

One executive compared the push to Trump's renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which saw uneven adoption among oil industry leaders. That comparison is more devastating than it sounds. The Gulf renaming had the full force of presidential authority behind it, and even the industry it flattered couldn't be bothered to comply consistently. "Super Intelligence" is starting from a weaker position: at least "Gulf of America" didn't require everyone to unlearn a term the entire world already uses.

AI company representatives declined to comment publicly on the rebrand, Axios reports — though some told the outlet privately that their organisations support the strategy as a matter of government relations. Translation: it's cheaper to nod along than to argue with the man who controls your federal contracts.

Our take: a colossally cynical costume change

Let's call this what it is. The "Super Intelligence" rebrand is one of the most colossally cynical exercises in political marketing in recent memory — and that is a crowded field.

The logic collapses on contact with reality. The backlash Axios describes is not about a word. Nobody is protesting outside a data centre in Virginia because they dislike the adjective "artificial." They are protesting because the data centre is drinking their county's water, straining their grid, and raising their electricity bills. Renaming the thing inside the building does not change a single watt of what the building consumes. It is the equivalent of rebranding a landfill as a "super cleanliness facility" and acting surprised when the neighbours keep complaining about the smell.

There is also a genuine intellectual insult buried in the new term. "Superintelligence" already means something specific: a hypothetical system that exceeds human ability across a wide range of cognitive tasks. It is the subject of decades of serious research and serious worry. Using it as a synonym for today's chatbots and coding assistants doesn't elevate the technology — it degrades the vocabulary we need to talk about what comes next. When the actually-superintelligent systems arrive, what will we call them? Super-duper intelligence?

The 53-to-9 poll is the public doing something the tech industry rarely credits it with: seeing through the trick. Americans didn't reject the rebrand because they love the word "artificial." They rejected it because the rebrand treats them like fools — as if their concerns about jobs, bills, and the environment were really just a branding problem that a focus group could fix. It is shoddy politics and shoddier strategy, and the numbers say so out loud.

What happens next

The machinery grinds on regardless. Federal agencies will start scrubbing "AI" from official communications. The science adviser's 60-day clock is ticking toward a proposed federal definition. Diplomats have their orders. And somewhere, a junior staffer is right now doing a find-and-replace across ten thousand pages of government documents — the most expensive rebranding exercise in the history of synonyms.

But the poll puts a ceiling on the whole project. A rebrand that 9% of the country prefers is not a rebrand; it is a presidential hobby. The tech executives know it — that's why they're saving the new vocabulary for meetings with the administration. The public knows it — that's why the numbers look like this. The only people who haven't caught on are the ones who ordered it.

Watch the 60-day definition proposal. If it tries to give "Super Intelligence" real legal teeth — replacing the statutory definition of AI — this story gets much bigger, and much uglier. If it lands as a memo nobody reads, the rebrand will join the long list of Trump-era renamings that the country politely ignored. Either way, we'll be here, still calling it AI. Like 53% of America.

The rebrand already has one unexpected winner — Slovenia's registry collected roughly €440,000 in September as speculators bought .si domains.

YouGov 'super intelligence' poll: the questions everyone asks

What did the poll actually find? 53% of Americans prefer "artificial intelligence"; only 9% want "super intelligence". The poll was reported by Axios on 1 October via YouGov.

What did Trump actually order? The 29 September executive order directs the executive branch to use "Super Intelligence" and "SI" "to the maximum extent permitted by law" — federal usage only.

Was the rebrand ever popular? Nothing in the record suggests it: not the poll, not the executives' private shrug at the 30 September meeting, and not the pledge that managed to misspell "United States".

Could the order change anything real? Only what the federal government calls the technology in its own documents. Industry, press and the public are under no obligation to follow.

Sources

Axios, "Trump, CEOs try to shed AI's toxic branding" (1 October 2026), via Newsmax's write-up; the YouGov poll figures as reported by Axios; Newsmax, "Poll: Americans Prefer AI to Super Intelligence" (1 October 2026); Gizmodo, "If You're an AI Critic, Trump's 'Super Intelligence' Rebrand Is a Gift" (1 October 2026); details of the 29 September executive order via Newsmax and Homeland Security Today; background on the 29 September White House AI summit and accord from TechPulse USA's own earlier coverage.

Daniel Rao covers AI safety, frontier labs and technology policy for TechPulse USA. He writes about the people and institutions deciding what artificial intelligence is allowed to do.