Two percent. That’s the share of consumers buying what’s now being sold as “Super Intelligence,” according to TechCrunch. Not two percent growth, not two percent of some narrow early-adopter slice. Two percent of people, period, convinced by the pitch.
I review AI tools for a living. I sit through demo videos, I read changelogs nobody else reads, I test agents that promise to run my calendar and instead book meetings with people who don’t exist. So when I see a number like 2%, my first reaction isn’t surprise. It’s recognition.
A rename is not a product update
On September 30, 2026, President Trump announced the U.S. government would officially refer to artificial intelligence as “Super Intelligence.” He described it as “much bigger than internet.” Leaders from several major American technology companies signed a White House accord alongside the announcement.
The fine print matters more than the headline. The order covers terminology used by the U.S. executive branch. It doesn’t rename AI worldwide. Existing laws and previously issued documents aren’t automatically changed. So what actually shipped here was a style guide update for federal paperwork, accompanied by a press event.
I want to be fair about what a rename can and can’t do. Naming shapes how people think about technology. “Cloud” did real work in making server infrastructure feel approachable. “Smartphone” told people what category they were buying into. Words move markets sometimes.
But “Super Intelligence” is a different kind of naming move. “Cloud” made something complicated sound simpler. “Super Intelligence” makes something unreliable sound more powerful than it is. That’s the opposite direction, and consumers appear to have noticed.
Why 2% feels about right
Here’s what I see in my inbox and in my testing queue. People aren’t skeptical of AI because they haven’t heard the right word for it. They’re skeptical because they’ve used it.
- They’ve asked a chatbot a factual question and gotten a confident, wrong answer.
- They’ve watched an agent demo that worked flawlessly on stage and fell apart on their actual data.
- They’ve paid for a subscription, used it twice, and forgotten it existed until the renewal email arrived.
- They’ve been told the current version is almost there, which is the same thing they were told about the last version.
None of that gets fixed by a louder adjective. If anything, escalating the vocabulary while the products stay the same widens the gap between promise and experience. Every time the branding gets upgraded faster than the capability, the 98% gets a little more entrenched.
The trust math nobody wants to run
Consumer trust in this category is a credit account, and the industry has been spending against it for three years. Each overstated demo, each benchmark chart with a cropped y-axis, each “fully autonomous” agent that needs a human babysitter draws down the balance. A government-backed rebrand doesn’t deposit anything. It’s a marketing expense charged to the same account.
What would actually move the number? Boring things. Products that do one task reliably instead of forty tasks unpredictably. Pricing that matches delivered value instead of projected value. Honest capability statements, including the parts that don’t work yet. Error messages that admit uncertainty instead of inventing an answer.
I’ve reviewed tools that do this. They exist. They rarely get keynote slots, because “our transcription tool is accurate and cheap” doesn’t fill an auditorium. But those are the products people keep paying for after month three, and that retention is the only metric that distinguishes a real market from a funding cycle.
What I’ll be watching
The interesting question isn’t whether “Super Intelligence” catches on as a phrase. Federal documents will use it because they’ve been told to. The interesting question is whether the companies that signed that accord treat the new name as permission to keep making bigger claims, or as pressure to finally back the claims they’ve already made.
Because the 2% number is a report card. It says the gap between what this industry says and what it delivers has become visible to ordinary people, the ones who don’t read benchmark papers and don’t follow funding rounds. They just tried the thing and shrugged.
You can call it AI. You can call it Super Intelligence. You can call it whatever the next press conference decides. The 98% aren’t waiting on a better word. They’re waiting on a better product, and nobody has figured out how to rename their way into one.
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