By Ada "Peer-Review" Sparks
The language changed this week before the substance did. President Trump has begun pushing the term "Super Intelligence" to describe the AI push his administration favors, according to CNBC's Daily Open newsletter, while explicitly rejecting what he called a "globalist scheme" to regulate the technology internationally.
The rebrand lands just as AI safety is set to get an unusual amount of airtime at the upcoming summit between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. CNBC reports that recent weeks have seen AI safety fears "reach new heights," and that safety will be a genuine agenda item when the two leaders meet — but analysts cited by the outlet were blunt about the limits of that conversation: neither government actually wants to slow down.
That's the tension worth sitting with. A summit that puts AI safety "on the table" is not the same as a summit that produces a safety agreement. Two nuclear-armed economic rivals openly racing to build the most powerful AI systems, while also claiming to want guardrails, is a contradiction — not a scandal, just a fact about incentives. Whoever slows down first risks falling behind; whoever doesn't may be the one everyone else has to catch up to on safety later.
We don't yet know what, if anything, concrete will come out of the Trump-Xi talks on this front — CNBC's own reporting frames it as a topic for discussion, not a done deal. What we do know: the rhetoric of "Super Intelligence" versus the rhetoric of "globalist scheme" tells you which way the administration's incentives are already pointed. Worth watching whether any actual verification or enforcement mechanism ever gets named, rather than just the branding.
Extraordinary claims. Ordinary evidence? Then no.
— Compiled from reporting by CNBC.
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