Donald Trump recently hosted nearly two dozen Silicon Valley executives at the White House for lunch. The assembled billionaires signed a “morally binding” accord to improve internal audits and controls over technology that some of those present warned could destroy humanity.
Then, Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to stop using the term “artificial intelligence” and instead start calling the tech “Super Intelligence.” His rationale was that the word “artificial” makes it sound fake. It might be funny if it wasn’t so serious.
The new name had been crowdsourced days earlier in a poll on Trump’s own social media platform, pitting “Super Intelligence” against “Superior Intelligence.” Super won 65 to 35. And the announcement prompted a rush to secure domain names in Slovenia — Melania Trump’s homeland — which uses the .si suffix.
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, sitting at the table, dutifully obliged with the president. “We used to call them data centers,” he said. “These are really SI factories.”
Then, in the tit-for-tat of U.S. politics, California’s governor signed his own order a day later, declaring that the home state of Apple, Google and Anthropic would stick to AI.
Senator Mark Warner called the whole exercise what it was: a distraction. But it’s a dangerous one. Naming rights are about laying claim and framing the narrative. And for technology that seeks to leverage the sum total of humanity’s output, that’s not incidental.
“Changing what we call artificial intelligence does nothing to address the very real risks that come with increasingly powerful AI systems,” Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, said in a statement, lobbying for enforceable legislation instead of voluntary guardrails.
The episode appears to be just another farce alongside Trump’s efforts to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Ontario and the Kennedy Center. But it’s not. It’s more evidence of a leadership class losing touch with the people.
Americans are genuinely wary of what AI means for them and their lives and have become increasingly pessimistic on Trump’s handling of the issue. According to a September poll by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the share of people saying Trump has handled AI “not well at all” has risen to 43% from 36% in March.
Despite the diversion created by a coterie of billionaires bending the knee at Trump’s renaming ploy, there is a consequential AI debate happening over the question: who gets an AI dividend when and if it arrives?
Seeking to establish the terms, OpenAI published a policy paper earlier this year proposing a public wealth fund, a tax on companies that automate away jobs and pilot programs for a 32-hour workweek at full pay.
In June, Senator Bernie Sanders took up the issue and introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, legislation that would impose a one-time 50% stock tax on major AI companies. The equity base would assemble an estimated $7 trillion in assets and be able to make annual direct payments to Americans and fund programs in areas such as healthcare, education and housing.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman then in July countered with a proposal to voluntarily donate 5% of its own equity — worth roughly $42.6 billion at the time — to a U.S. sovereign wealth fund, adding that he hoped Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI, and Meta would match him. Anthropic’s founders have similarly pledged to donate 80% of their personal equity in the company to charitable causes.
The OpenAI pitch included talks with the Trump administration to make it real, according to the Financial Times. That’s a powerful coalition that seems to all agree that the public is owed a stake in AI’s returns rather than just a promise of benefits trickling down…or it looks that way on the surface.
The proposals seem well-meaning and draw inspiration from working examples like the Alaska Permanent Fund, which has been collecting a share of the state’s oil revenues and distributing money to residents since 1976. It has since swelled to more than $89 billion in assets. Norway runs the same logic at a much larger scale, with the $2.3 trillion Government Pension Fund Global.
Both funds are examples of stewardship (which I previously wrote about here). The idea is that returns from shared resources should flow to the public, rather than whoever extracted them. The difference is that AI mines humanity’s collective knowledge instead of localized fossil fuels.
A stake is not a voice
Despite the apparent well-meaning nature of these profit-sharing initiatives, they fall short in a very important way. An equity stake doesn’t provide the thing that actually matters: a voice. And for a technology that threatens to upend a society that’s based around individual autonomy, that’s problematic.
A dividend (if and when these companies become capable of paying one) doesn’t offer influence over what AI companies do with the data they’ve aggregated. The people have no say over how the systems are designed, which jobs they automate, how communities absorb the cost, or what groups get left behind.
Contrast that to the Mondragón Corporation (which I wrote about here), where the cooperative’s 70,000-plus worker-owners not only hold a financial interest but also vote on leadership, pay ratios and strategy. Elinor Ostrom’s research on governing the commons governance makes the same point. Durable, legitimate management of a shared resource depends on the people affected having real say, not just a cut of the proceeds.
That’s the structural problem that neither Altman’s nor Sanders’ version of a public stake in AI really addresses. Control remains highly concentrated in the hands of people like those who attended Trump’s summit (and acquiesced to his assertion of control over “SI”).
It’s not yet clear whether Trump’s interest in a public fund is about genuine redistribution, or another stunt to claim a “win.” In any case, a stake without a voice is the opposite of devolved power.
So what would it look like for artificial intelligence to be governed more from the ground up? Would it be something like ownership placed in a public trust with oversight by citizen councils?
It could be, but I don’t have a clean answer and neither does anyone currently drafting legislation. But it’s the question that decides whether AI ends up being a path toward a better future or an even more concentrated version of the top-down system we have now.
There’s also one more major gap that needs to be addressed. While Altman has said AI was built on the collective experience, knowledge, and learnings of humanity, all these proposals for dividend sharing are for a national fund.
Limiting the benefits to U.S. residents would cut out most of humanity. Countering such parochialism requires a global perspective and would mean forging alliances between citizens across borders, which would be a daunting task in its own right.
Ultimately, the fight over the control of artificial intelligence is a fight over control of the future. It might not really matter whether we call it AI or SI, but who sets the conditions to exert control does matter.
To paraphrase William Shakespeare, a rose by any other name will smell as sweet and powerful technology by any other name will still upend our lives and our planet. That is unless we rewrite the narrative from the ground up.