Trump after summit with Xi: AI to be called ‘superintelligence’ — but no new deal

Donald Trump spoke to reporters outside the White House on Saturday, September 26, before departing for Tennessee to attend a football game. “I say this that superintelligence, SI, I don’t call it AI anymore,” the U.S. president said, adding: “we had a big talk on SI, and he likes the idea of changing the name to SI, too,” USA Today reported.

Chinese President Xi Jinping had stressed on September 24 that artificial intelligence “must always remain under human control.” Trump, for his part, made clear that the United States will not be “putting on brakes” in this technology race: “United States of America is not going to be putting on brakes.” He insisted the U.S. leads China “by a year or two” and has no intention of sharing the technology with Beijing — “when you’re leading, you don’t open it up to each other.”

Trump also downplayed warnings that artificial intelligence poses an existential risk to humanity, comparing them to earlier projections about climate change. A week earlier, Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders and Trump ally Steve Bannon had publicly urged the president to seek a slowdown of artificial intelligence development during the summit — a call that was ignored.

The state dinner hosted at the White House on the occasion of the visit was attended by the top leaders of the tech industry: OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Google/Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Apple’s Tim Cook and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. In his speech at the United Nations this week, Trump said he would not “smother” the growth of artificial intelligence — which he called “bigger than the industrial revolution” — while dismissing AI safety warnings as a “hoax.”