Three takeaways from Trump's 'Super Intelligence' summit

Donald Trump turned Tuesday’s White House summit into a show of force. He hosted leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, SpaceX, Meta and Google, then framed the meeting as part of “America’s Golden Age.” The optics were the point. So were the messages: back AI, build faster, and stop talking about “artificial intelligence” as if the term still fits.

The clearest product of the meeting was a “morally binding” document Trump said would protect people from AI risks. The companies behind it are supposed to keep their systems safe, put safeguards in place, spot problems quickly and fix them. They also agreed to work with independent auditors and avoid letting their platforms “hack or access technical systems in unintended ways.” Trump signed it too, alongside Sundar Pichai, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk and Jensen Huang. He described it as almost constitutional. Critics were far less impressed, saying the pact does not explain who is accountable when things go wrong, or what happens when the rules are broken.

Trump also came out swinging for data centres, the warehouses of computing power that AI needs. That push is getting real resistance. Communities are already complaining about electricity use and local disruption, and a Marist Poll for NPR and PBS News found 65% of registered voters opposed data centres being built in their areas. Still, Trump said the companies would make people “happy” with the construction, while Huang went further and called data centres “super intelligence factories” that are “reindustrialising the United States.”

Then came the branding exercise. Trump signed an executive order telling US agencies to start using “SI” and “Super Intelligence” instead of artificial intelligence in official communications. He had already said at the United Nations that “artificial” made the tech sound fake. Now the White House is trying to rename the thing while the debate over how to control it is still very much alive.