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Newsom orders California to say AI after Trump’s ‘superintelligence’ decree

The governor’s executive order comes as Trump tries to make the “superintelligence” rebrand stick.

By Tyler Katzenberger

Donald Trump’s quest to rebrand AI has a new opponent.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order Wednesday requiring state agencies to refer to the technology only as “artificial intelligence” or AI. The directive came a day after Trump issued his own decree pushing the name “superintelligence” and recruited top tech executives to back his move.

“Super intelligence is clearly not coming from the White House — that’s why California continues to lead,” Newsom said in a statement accompanying his order, which asserted the decree was “informed by common sense.”

Newsom paired his announcement with a series of bill signings that impose new policies aimed at protecting workers against AI, such as layoff notices and limits on the technology’s use in disciplinary and firing decisions.

Trump told reporters Tuesday that he’s directing the federal government to use the term “superintelligence” because AI is “not artificial, we all agree on that.” Tech executives who attended a Tuesday luncheon at the White House used the term when speaking to reporters after.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI President Greg Brockman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang all signed a “White House Accord on Super Intelligence” on Tuesday that encourages companies to closely monitor their AI models’ capabilities and stand up internal teams that ensure models don’t carry out unintended hacks. The document notably misspelled the U.S. as the “Unites States” in a line under Trump’s signature.