It’s not AI anymore, it’s ‘super intelligence’ (according to the White House)

There is a peculiar magic trick happening in Washington this week: call a purely voluntary document "morally binding" and suddenly the optics of accountability replace the substance of it. The pledge signed by tech's ruling class—Musk standing alongside the very OpenAI leadership he sued, Bezos and Zuckerberg sharing oxygen with an administration that has oscillated between courting and threatening them—is less a governance instrument than a group photo with a press release attached. The word "binding" is doing heroic work here, because the only thing actually binding these CEOs to anything is their own public relations calculus. The executive order rebranding AI as "super intelligence" deserves closer scrutiny than the soundbite it generated. This is not a technical classification; it's a political frame. Calling it "super intelligence" positions the administration as stewards of something awe-inspiring and inevitable, shifting the burden of proof onto anyone who raises concerns about safety, labor displacement, or concentration of power. You don't regulate "super intelligence" with the same mundane tools you'd apply to a software category—you celebrate it, fund it, and let the market race ahead. The language primes the public to expect miracles, which conveniently lowers the bar for what counts as acceptable risk. The friendlier faces from Meta and OpenAI are the third leg of this stool. When your CEO is signing a safety pledge in one room while your product team is softening chatbot personas in another, the message is coherent only if you read it cynically: safety is a talking point, not a design constraint. The industry wants consumers to feel warm and fuzzy about AI just as the political class wants voters to feel awe. Both are selling the same thing—reassurance—while the underlying trajectory of capability growth and deployment speed remains unchanged. What's genuinely notable here is the convergence of interests. An administration that wants to claim credit for AI's economic upside, and tech companies that want to avoid regulation, have found a mutually beneficial vocabulary. "Super intelligence" flatters the industry's ambitions; "morally binding" flatters the administration's sense of authority. Neither phrase appears in any statute, and that's precisely the point. The real story from this summit is not that the White House tamed Big Tech—it's that both sides discovered they could perform governance without practicing it. Source: https://techcrunch.com/video/its-not-ai-anymore-its-super-intelligence-according-to-the-white-house/