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It’s a big week for global leaders talking about AI. We’ve got a bunch of presidents and prime ministers at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York—motorcades are creating chaos in Midtown Manhattan right now—and Chinese president Xi Jinping is due to arrive in Washington tomorrow. The top executives from most big tech firms will be at a state dinner on Thursday night with Xi, while some will also be at the U.N. earlier in the week.
You can bet AI will dominate much of the discussion both at the U.N. and in Washington. It’s unlikely anything of substance will emerge, although there’ll be plenty of breathless headlines. On Tuesday morning, for instance, President Donald Trump made news by pronouncing that artificial intelligence would henceforth be known as super intelligence in U.S. government paperwork, because the word “artificial” makes AI sound “fake.” (See below for more on this.) Glad to see the leader of the free world is staying on top of the most important issues!
Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham was reported to be planning to insert his country into the AI regulatory debate by claiming the U.K. could play the “honest broker” in AI governance. Cute. Otherwise, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is due to speak to the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday. The ChatGPT firm on Monday outlined the need for “international efforts to develop standards” for AI safety, so Altman will presumably elaborate on that. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is reportedly also speaking to the U.N. Security Council.
The real action, though, may be in Washington, when Xi and Trump meet. Maybe they’ll discuss some way of working together to address AI safety, as U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Sunday officials from both sides had discussed. Xi, meanwhile, may be feeling a little irritated that Anthropic has accused some of China’s best-known AI firms of using Anthropic’s Claude illicitly—and in some cases routing sensitive Chinese data to Claude.
That prompted China’s internet regulator to investigate DeepSeek and Moonshot AI over possibly breaching Chinese data security rules, we scooped today. Could this be why Xi, according to The Wall Street Journal, isn’t expected to bring corporate executives with him? As this U.S.-China expert explained in a post on X today, the “fraught relationship” between Chinese AI companies and the Chinese government is a hugely undercovered story.
Super v. Artificial?
Did Ilya Sutskever just win the lottery? Trump’s declarationthat he was changing the name of artificial intelligence to superintelligence—SI instead of AI—could be great news for Sutskever’s AI startup, Safe Superintelligence Inc., or SSI. If Trump succeeds in replacing the AI term with SI, Sutskever’s company has the perfect brand.
Sutskever might be even better off than Meta Platforms, whose CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, seems to be thinking along the same lines as Trump. Zuckerberg likes to talk about personal superintelligence, and his AI unit is called Meta Superintelligence Labs. (What’s the bet that most people prefer their super intelligence to be safe rather than personal?)
Still, neither Sutskever nor Zuckerberg should celebrate yet. While Trump might be able to persuade Apple and Google to partially adopt the Lake America name in place of Lake Ontario, it’s hard to see anyone listening to him on AI. That term is just too ingrained in the culture right now. So while Trump’s decree might work for U.S. government paperwork, that’s probably as far as it goes.
In Other News
• OpenAI on Tuesday announced GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, which it describes as cheaper and faster models in the GPT-6 Astra family.
• Alibaba on Tuesday unveiled a powerful new AI chip for training and running models, highlighting the rapid progress in China’s domestic semiconductor capabilities.
• Meta’s new personal AI agent, Muse, had more than 500,000 people try it out roughly a week after launch, including 250,000-plus daily active users, according to internal data viewed by The Information. Users have also submitted more than 2 million prompts.
Today on The Information’s TITV
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