Two men stood at the same podium hours apart on Tuesday and described artificial intelligence in almost opposite terms. Outgoing UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres used his final General Assembly address to call runaway AI one of three existential threats facing the world and to demand a multilateral risk framework. President Trump followed with a rejection of exactly that idea, telling the assembly the United States "totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme of control for Artificial Intelligence." He added a suggestion that has been building since his weekend social media posts: rename the technology "super intelligence."

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What Guterres asked for

Reuters reported that Guterres, whose second five-year term ends on December 31, used this year's speech, his last as Secretary-General, to press again for global oversight of AI risks. He told the roughly 130 leaders in the hall that "our mechanisms for collective action are under growing strain" and that existing institutions "continue to reflect the power realities and interests of a largely bygone age," according to Inside AI's account.

The request is not new. In 2023 the UN set up a 39-member advisory body on AI whose members included tech executives, officials and academics from the US, Russia and Japan, and last year the General Assembly approved two standing mechanisms: an Independent International Scientific Panel on AI and a Global Dialogue on AI Governance. Guterres's ask this week, per Inside AI, was for countries driving AI development to share safety data and build common safeguards, an appeal timed to land just as the UN Security Council prepared to host AI industry leaders for a briefing on the technology's risks.

Three years after that Security Council session, Reuters notes, no binding international agreement on AI has emerged. The panel and the dialogue exist; enforceable rules do not.

What Trump said in response

Trump's UN address covered Iran, Greenland, Cuba and what he called seven ended wars before turning to AI. TND's report quotes him directly: "The United States totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme of control for Artificial Intelligence. Whoever wins AI, WINS! We are leading now over China, and everyone else, and I'm going to keep it that way." CNN's live coverage adds a companion line: "I'm not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the industrial revolution."

He repeated the enforcement approach he first laid out over the weekend: rely on the Justice Department and existing law enforcement to go after bad actors rather than writing AI-specific rules, and stand up an "AI Force" modeled on the Space Force. Our earlier report on Trump's AI Force announcement covers the weekend version of this argument, including his dismissal of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's slowdown warning as a "hoax."

The rebrand: AI becomes "super intelligence"

TND's report says Trump also floated dropping the term "artificial intelligence" in favor of "super intelligence." That tracks with a detail Gizmodo flagged from over the weekend: Trump ran an informal Truth Social poll narrowing renaming options to "Superior Intelligence" or "Extreme Intelligence." The UN speech did not settle on a single replacement term, but the direction is consistent across both moments: reframe AI as something to win, not something to be governed.

A name change carries no legal weight on its own. What it signals is rhetorical: "artificial" intelligence is a thing to regulate, while "super" intelligence is a thing to race for. Whether that framing catches on outside Trump's own remarks is untested.

Why the two speeches don't fully talk past each other

It would be easy to read this as two leaders simply ignoring one another, but the disagreement is more specific than that. Guterres wants shared safety data and common safeguards decided through a multilateral body. Trump wants no binding international authority over AI at all, paired with a bilateral, government-to-government channel with a single rival: the AI incident notification mechanism his own Treasury Secretary proposed to China days earlier, detailed in our piece on the US-China AI dialogue.

Read together, the two proposals show a real fork in approach, not just a rhetorical clash. One model spreads oversight across many countries through UN bodies with no enforcement power yet. The other concentrates it in direct arrangements between the two governments that matter most to frontier AI, with enforcement left to each country's own courts and agencies. Both models could, in theory, coexist. Whether they will is an open question neither man addressed directly.

Where this leaves actual policy

For now, nothing that happened Tuesday changes the legal status of AI anywhere. The UN's Scientific Panel and Global Dialogue continue as advisory and consultative bodies without binding authority. The US has made no formal commitment on the China notification channel beyond Bessent's description of the proposal. The EU's AI Act, adopted in 2024, remains the only hard regulatory framework of real scale, and neither speech mentioned it directly.

What did change is the public positioning ahead of this week's Trump-Xi summit and the Security Council's AI briefing. Guterres has put a marker down as he leaves office. Trump has put a competing marker down days before sitting across from the leader of the country his own approach is built around outracing.

What to watch this week

The Security Council's briefing with AI industry leaders is the next concrete event, and it will show whether any government beyond the US and China treats the notification-style approach as a template or holds out for something closer to what Guterres described. The Trump-Xi meeting will show whether the AI dialogue proposal survives contact with an actual negotiation. And Trump's promised AI czar appointment, still unnamed as of this week, will say something about which wing of his own coalition, the industry-aligned one or the more skeptical one led by figures like Sen. Josh Hawley, has more say over what an "AI Force" actually does.

Frequently asked questions

What did Guterres call for regarding AI?

In his final UN General Assembly address as Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres called runaway AI one of three existential threats facing the world and urged countries to share safety data and build a multilateral risk-management framework, building on the UN's existing Scientific Panel on AI and Global Dialogue on AI Governance.

What did Trump say about AI at the UN?

Trump said the US "totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme of control for Artificial Intelligence," repeated his line that whoever wins AI wins, and said his administration would rely on the Justice Department and existing law enforcement rather than new AI-specific rules.

Is Trump actually renaming AI to "super intelligence"?

He has floated the term in his UN speech and ran a related Truth Social poll over the weekend narrowing options to "Superior Intelligence" or "Extreme Intelligence." No formal or legal renaming has occurred; it remains a rhetorical framing so far.

Does the US support any international cooperation on AI?

Yes, but on different terms than the UN's multilateral approach. Days before the UN speeches, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent proposed a bilateral AI incident notification channel with China, to be discussed at the upcoming Trump-Xi summit.