Nicolai Haugsted
Trump’s big “super intelligence” announcement gets overshadowed by a rather unfortunate spelling mistake
Donald Trump gathered some of the biggest names in technology at the White House on Tuesday with an ambitious message about America’s place in the next technological revolution.
Google’s Sundar Pichai was there. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg was there. Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI president Greg Brockman also put their names on a new agreement aimed at making advanced artificial intelligence safer.
Trump even has a new name for the technology.
Artificial intelligence is now “Super Intelligence” in the terminology adopted by his administration.
Considering the subject matter, somebody probably wishes the final document had received one more spell-check.
Directly underneath Trump’s signature, the president’s title contained a small but conspicuous error.
Instead of “President of the United States,” it read: “President of the Unites States.”
Super intelligence meets the Unites States
Trump posted the signed White House Accord on Super Intelligence to Truth Social following Tuesday’s gathering.
The agreement itself deals with rather serious questions.
Companies developing frontier AI models committed to four layers of safeguards, beginning with internal controls designed to monitor how their systems behave during training and deployment.
Participating companies also agreed to establish internal oversight teams, work with independent external auditors and create independent board committees responsible for reviewing the results and ensuring that identified problems are addressed.
Those details quickly found themselves competing for attention with two misplaced letters.
Trump’s signature appeared above his incorrectly printed title, making the typo particularly easy to spot once images of the document began circulating online.
Social media does what social media does
Online observers did not require much encouragement.
“My God in heaven,” one X user wrote, according to the Mirror. “They are so unbelievably, truly stupid.”
Another took aim at the contrast between the mistake and the subject of the agreement.
“A presidential proclamation misspelled United States as ‘Unites States.’ So much for super intelligence.”
Someone else kept the joke considerably simpler.
“Being President of the United States is that difficult. They can’t even spell United States correctly.”
Those comments represent social-media reactions rather than assessments of the substance of the White House agreement.
Still, “Super Intelligence” appearing a few inches above “Unites States” supplied critics with a punchline that required very little additional work.
The actual accord goes considerably beyond spelling
Tuesday’s agreement is voluntary rather than a new binding federal regulatory regime.
Trump described the arrangement as “morally binding,” while the accord says its safeguards could eventually be written into laws or regulations. Participating companies also intend to meet regularly to establish common standards and safety practices.
The internal controls are supposed to address risks involving cybersecurity, biosecurity and chemical threats, among other areas.
Companies are also expected to ensure that their models do not hack or access technical systems in unintended ways.
Trump has favored industry self-regulation over more restrictive government controls.
“I think I’m seeing tremendous self-policing. And they understand that they have to self-police,” Trump said Tuesday.
Six technology executives ultimately signed the accord alongside him: Pichai, Amodei, Zuckerberg, Brockman, Musk and Huang.
Trump has officially retired the term AI
Tuesday’s gathering also brought a linguistic overhaul considerably more intentional than the one underneath Trump’s signature.
Trump announced that his administration would use “Super Intelligence,” or SI, in place of artificial intelligence in official federal communications.
An executive order defines the new term using the existing statutory definition of artificial intelligence and instructs federal agencies to adopt the terminology.
Trump argued that the old name no longer adequately describes increasingly sophisticated technology.
“I will never stifle the growth of a technology that will be bigger than the industrial revolution,” he said. “We can’t stifle it, and we’re leading by a lot.”
His administration is therefore trying to make “Super Intelligence” part of the official Washington vocabulary.
“Unites States,” presumably, was not part of the rebranding exercise.
Trump has some history with troublesome letters
Spelling mishaps have followed Trump before.
Perhaps none became more famous than “covfefe,” the mysterious word he posted on Twitter shortly after midnight in May 2017.
“Despite the negative press covfefe,” Trump wrote.
The unfinished post became an immediate internet phenomenon and remained online for hours.
Another typo arrived in 2019 when Trump listed foreign leaders he had recently met and referred to the then-Prince Charles as the “Prince of Whales.”
Neither episode prevented Trump from continuing his prolific social-media presence, and Tuesday’s error appears on a prepared White House document rather than in a hurried personal post.
That distinction may make the latest mistake more awkward for the administration rather than less.
Tuesday was supposed to showcase Trump sitting alongside leaders from some of the world’s most powerful technology companies and presenting a framework for keeping increasingly sophisticated machines under control.
The agreement still does exactly that.
Its accidental contribution to the English language just happened to attract some attention of its own.
