White House Rebrands AI as 'Super Intelligence' — Consumers Aren't Sold

Washington is giving artificial intelligence a new name. This week, the White House convened nearly every major tech CEO — Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Anthropic's Dario Amodei among them — to sign an AI safety pledge that President Donald Trump described as "morally binding," according to TechCrunch. Trump also signed an executive order officially rebranding AI as "super intelligence," a semantic shift that signals how the administration wants the technology framed.

The pledge in the room

The gathering itself was the news. Getting the industry's biggest names into one room to commit to a safety pledge — with the president calling it morally binding — is a display of alignment between Washington and Silicon Valley that would have been hard to imagine a few years ago. What exactly the pledge commits its signatories to, and how "morally binding" translates into anything enforceable, remains an open question. According to TechCrunch's reporting, the episode raised the optics as much as the substance.

The consumer problem

Here's the tension underneath the ceremony: only about 2% of consumers are buying into AI, according to TechCrunch's Equity podcast framing. While the White House upgrades the vocabulary to "super intelligence" and Meta and OpenAI give their AI products friendlier faces, the actual economics of consumer AI remain ugly. The rebrand solves a perception problem; it does nothing about adoption.

Where the money actually is

The biggest money in AI, as TechCrunch notes, is still coming from the enterprise. Corporate buyers — not households — are writing the checks that fund the data centers and model training runs. That's the part of the story that doesn't need rebranding: businesses are paying real money for AI infrastructure and applications, even as the consumer market for AI products stays soft.

Why it matters

The administration clearly sees AI as a defining technology worth presidential branding. But a name change doesn't alter the fundamentals: consumer demand is the weak link, and enterprise spending is the engine. Until "super intelligence" means something concrete for the 98% of consumers who aren't buying, the rebrand is a headline, not a turning point.

Written by the BidAsk Newsroom. Based on reporting from the sources below.