👋🏾 HI, HEY, HELLO! Welcome back to Congress Nerd Daily. I hope today was everything for you. The midterms are in 42 days.
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) is on the Senate floor calling for congressional action on AI and previewing legislation he plans to introduce later this week. The Make AI Work for Americans Act would create a Big Tech-funded pot of money to help workers navigate AI-driven changes in the workplace and broader economy. The timing couldn’t be better: Today’s View From The Hill focuses on Washington’s AI debate—and President Donald Trump’s new name for the technology.
The Senate has two votes starting at 5:30 p.m., beginning with cloture on the nomination of Angela Colmenero to serve as a federal judge for the Southern District of Texas. Senators will then vote on cloture for the Cruz-Cantwell substitute to the Protect College Sports Act, moving the chamber another step toward a final vote on the bipartisan college-sports package. The Senate voted 77–22 last week to take up the bill after an earlier 74–24 cloture vote.
VIEW FROM THE HILL
President Trump has renamed bodies of water, military bases and federal institutions. Now he wants to rename an entire technology.
Trump announced during his address to the United Nations General Assembly this morning that the U.S. government would begin referring to artificial intelligence as “super intelligence,” or SI, because he thinks “artificial” makes the technology sound fake.
“From this point forward, all of United States documents, and hopefully the world’s, will be changed to use the much more accurate term ‘super’ as opposed to artificial,” Trump said.
The declaration extends a second-term fixation with renaming the familiar—from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and Lake Ontario to Lake America, to the Pentagon’s adoption of “Department of War” as a secondary title.
But Trump’s latest rebrand came with a consequential policy argument: The U.S. should prioritize developing increasingly powerful AI over regulating its risks.
“Whoever wins AI—you have to remember this—and now I say whoever wins SI, whoever wins super intelligence wins,” Trump said. “That’s the group that wins.”
Trump dismissed warnings that AI could cause catastrophic harm as a hoax and rejected international regulation of the technology, although he said the Justice Department would monitor the industry.
“I am not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution,” he said.
