US Treasury Tells IMF to Rename AI 'Super Intelligence'

The IMF headquarters in Washington, D.C. Treasury Undersecretary Erin Browne told Reuters on Thursday that the US wants the IMF's steering committee to rename AI "super intelligence" in its draft statement. Credit: APK, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Trump administration is now lobbying foreign finance ministries over vocabulary. On Thursday, Treasury Undersecretary for International Affairs Erin Browne told Reuters that Washington wants the IMF's steering committee to replace "artificial intelligence" with "super intelligence" in its draft communiqué — and, per the same Reuters report, has suggested in closed meetings that it will insist on the change, raising eyebrows among the committee's members.

It is, quite possibly, the strangest diplomatic dispute of the year. And it is the logical endpoint of a two-week campaign — executive order, website relaunch, rally chants — to retire the term "AI" by presidential fiat.

What Browne told Reuters — and what she wouldn't say

"President Trump has been really clear on this, and he's, you know, using the term SI, and I think it's a clear priority for the US to use that term, and we think that more appropriately encapsulates the technology at hand," Browne told Reuters in an interview on Thursday.

The ask lands in a very specific room. The International Monetary and Financial Committee — the IMFC, the IMF's steering committee — is drafting its regular statement on the global economy, and the United States, which currently holds the rotating G20 presidency, wants the new vocabulary baked into it.

But Browne, whose answers in the interview were peppered with the verbal cushion "you know," stopped short of the one question that actually matters. Asked whether Washington would refuse to sign the statement without the wording change, she declined: "We're still in the middle of negotiations on that statement, so I'm not going to, you know, sort of run ahead of that."

The insistence, however, is real enough. A source familiar with the matter told Reuters that US officials have suggested in IMFC meetings that they would insist on the new language — a demand that, in the wire's telling, raised eyebrows among the committee's members.

Every IMFC-specific claim in this story comes from that single Reuters report, filed by Andrea Shalal. As of Thursday night, no other major wire or newspaper has independently corroborated it — only syndication. Treat that as the confidence interval it is.

The fallback plans, ranked by embarrassment

If the US withholds its support, the committee has options, and none of them flatters the process. Reuters reported that IMFC chair Mohammed Al-Jadaan — Saudi Arabia's finance minister — could issue a chair's statement instead of a consensus communiqué. That is the diplomatic equivalent of publishing the minutes with an asterisk.

Alternatively, negotiators have floated an option so bland it might actually survive: skip both "SI" and "AI" and write "new technology" instead. Consider what that means. The world's finance ministers, faced with a superpower demanding a neologism, may respond by saying nothing at all — a linguistic white flag.

Sixteen days from an executive order to a global summit

This did not come out of nowhere. It came out of September 29, when Trump signed the executive order "Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence," directing every federal department and agency to replace "AI" with "SI" — as we reported when the order was signed. The White House fact sheet didn't mince words: the era had a name now, and it wasn't "artificial intelligence."</p>

The same day, the White House hosted a Superintelligence Summit and unveiled a "morally binding" White House Superintelligence Protocol — signed by, among others, Google's Sundar Pichai, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, and Nvidia's Jensen Huang, per Gizmodo and TheStreet. Our full coverage of that accord is here.

Since then, the rebrand has metastasized at remarkable speed. On October 4, Musk posted: "No more AI. SI. It's better" — and SpaceX's AI subsidiary SpaceXAI became SpaceXSI, per Nature. Around October 8–9, Trump took to Truth Social to denounce critics of the rename as "THE ENEMY," per Business Today and Fast Company.

On October 10, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella published an essay titled "Models as Insider Risks in the Super Intelligence Era" — in which the letters "AI" appear not once. For context on the thaw between the White House and Redmond, see our coverage of the Nadella medal ceremony.

Two days later, the Justice Department instructed staff to adopt the new language. On October 13, SI.gov went live, with AI.gov redirecting into it, and the White House's tech policy chief Michael Kratsios declared on X: "The Super Intelligence era is here." On Thursday, the new White House Super Intelligence Task Force met — our explainer on the task force is here.

File photo: President Donald J. Trump. At a rally in Bullhead City, Arizona, on Wednesday, Trump claimed tech executives and China's leader agreed the term should be "superintelligence" — a claim with no independent confirmation. Credit: Daniel Torok, The White House, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

And on Wednesday night, at a rally in Bullhead City, Arizona, Trump made the pitch in person. "Sometimes it may get too super; that's what we have to watch," he said, before adding: "They agree with me, it's really superintelligence, so we're going with that term." That is Trump's claim — reported via the IANS wire — and it should be read as such: no confirmation from the executives or from Beijing was available.

Then came Thursday's one-two: Browne's Reuters interview, and Fast Company's verdict — which framed the whole exercise as "slick marketing sugarcoating" for a technology "Trump isn't polling well on," and chalked it up as a rebrand fail.

Scientists say the new word is already taken

The pushback, it turns out, is not just diplomatic. It's scientific — and blunt.

"None of this has rigorous meaning," said Melanie Mitchell, a complexity researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, in comments carried by Nature. "People can use these terms to mean what they want."

Nature also flagged the emptiest detail of all: the executive order defines "Super Intelligence" as the same technologies covered by the statutory definition of AI. Only the label changed. The scope didn't.

Researchers who spoke to the BBC and tech-oracle around October 1 went further, calling the rebrand "premature" and "deceptive" — because in the research literature, "SI" already means something specific: systems far beyond human capability, which today's models are not.

"I doubt 'SI' will stick, in part because it exaggerates the current capacities of AI," said Simon Coghlan, an AI ethics researcher at the University of Melbourne.

An IMF communiqué is not a press release

Here's where we land. A president can rename the vocabulary of his own bureaucracy — that is what executive orders are for, and the federal machinery is now dutifully saying "SI." But demanding that the finance ministers of some 190 countries adopt the same neologism in a consensus communiqué is a different sport entirely. It asks the world's most cautious institution to co-sign a branding exercise that working scientists call deceptive, and it attaches a price to refusal: a downgraded chair's statement, a communiqué that says "new technology," a public fight over a word in a year when the IMF has actual crises to write about.

Whatever you think of "super intelligence" as a phrase, this is a colossally shoddy venue in which to force it. The IMF statement is supposed to steady markets. Turning it into a proof-of-concept for a White House slogan does the opposite.

Saturday decides it

The resolution point is already scheduled. Any agreed statement — and the IMFC news conference that presents it — lands on Saturday, led by Al-Jadaan and IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, per Reuters. By the weekend, we'll know whether the communiqué says "super intelligence," "new technology," or something the negotiators haven't invented yet.

If the SI language survives, Washington will have exported a rebrand to global finance. If it doesn't, the last two weeks will read as a particular kind of history: a government that renamed everything except reality.

We verified the licensing pages for both photographs in this article and viewed them ourselves before publication — the IMF building image is CC BY 4.0 by Wikimedia user APK; the Trump portrait is a public-domain White House photograph by Daniel Torok.

Frequently asked questions

What does the US want the IMF to call AI?
"Super intelligence" — abbreviated "SI" — in place of "artificial intelligence" and "AI," in the statement being drafted by the IMF's steering committee, the IMFC. Treasury Undersecretary Erin Browne told Reuters on Thursday that it is "a clear priority for the US to use that term."

Who decides what goes into the IMFC statement?
The committee's members negotiate a consensus text. If consensus breaks down — as it might here — IMFC chair Mohammed Al-Jadaan, Saudi Arabia's finance minister, can issue a chair's statement instead, per Reuters.

Has any country publicly pushed back on the rename?
Not publicly and not by name. But Reuters reported that US insistence on the new language raised eyebrows among IMFC members. Scientists have been blunter: researchers have called the rebrand "premature" and "deceptive," since "SI" already denotes systems far beyond human capability.

Does the new name change anything legally?
No. Nature reported that the September 29 executive order defines "Super Intelligence" as the same technologies covered by the statutory definition of AI — the label changed, and nothing else did.

Sources: Reuters (Andrea Shalal); Nature; Fast Company; Gizmodo; TheStreet; Business Today; IANS wire; the White House ("Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Inaugurates The Era of Super Intelligence"); TechPulse USA's own published posts (all URLs verified live on 15 October 2026).

TechPulse USA Newsroom is an independent tech publication covering AI and US technology policy for a global audience. We build every story on primary sources and named outlets, and we verify every fact we print.