I was sitting in a coworking space in Roma Norte last September, watching the peso tick against the dollar on one monitor and a Bloomberg terminal feed on the other, when a client pinged me a link to a government press release. The headline said something about an executive order and a new federal website. Standard fare. But buried in the third paragraph was a phrase that made me put down my coffee: the administration was reportedly planning to rename artificial intelligence as 'Superintelligence' across official government communications.
I've spent nineteen years watching this industry from the uncomfortable position of someone who has to explain it to people who control real money. I survived EtherParty in 2017 because I was too busy partying in Polanco to read the whitepaper carefully enough to be scared. I survived DeFi Summer because the Discord energy was more compelling than the audit reports. I survived the 2022 collapse because I finally learned to read the macro tea leaves before the leverage blew up. Every one of those scars taught me the same lesson: when the language around a technology gets inflated faster than the technology itself, somebody is about to lose money — or freedom, or both.
This is not a story about an AI model. This is a story about a semantic weapon dressed as a policy initiative, and the crypto industry — which just spent two years begging for institutional legitimacy — should be paying very close attention to the playbook.
What Actually Happened, Stripped of the Puffery
Here's what the reporting actually contains, and I want to be surgical about this because the information density is embarrassingly low. A twelve-point news brief, and only three or four of those points are substantive facts. The rest is positioning, repetition, and vibes.
The substantive claims:Donald Trump is reportedly preparing to sign an executive order advancing artificial intelligence across the federal government. That order would reportedly rename AI as 'Superintelligence' in official usage. And a new government website — america.gov — has launched, described as an 'AI-driven' platform designed to consolidate federal services and help citizens access information instantly.
That's it. Those are the load-bearing facts. Everything else is either a direct quote framing the initiative as a defense of American technological leadership, or a restatement of the same three actions. There is no executive order text. No federal register entry. No technical specification for the website. No budget. No named contractor. No privacy impact assessment. No definition of what 'AI-driven' actually means in this context — whether it's a large language model, a retrieval-augmented generation pipeline, or a rebranded content management system with a chat widget bolted on.
I want you to sit with that gap for a moment. A government is preparing to rename an entire class of technology using a term that, in the research community, describes systems that do not yet exist and may never exist in the form the public imagines. And the reporting treats this as a minor detail.
The 'Superintelligence' Rename Is Not Cosmetic
Let me be precise about the terminology, because precision is the only thing standing between us and a very expensive misunderstanding. 'Artificial intelligence' as it exists in 2024 and 2025 is a broad category that includes everything from spam filters to frontier language models. 'AGI' — artificial general intelligence — refers to a hypothetical system matching human cognitive performance across all domains. 'Superintelligence' or 'ASI' refers to a system that surpasses the collective cognitive output of humanity. These are not synonyms. They are separated by what every serious researcher would call a civilizational gap.
When a government officially substitutes the third term for the first, it does something specific and dangerous. It collapses the conceptual distance between the tools we have and the tools we fear. It tells the public that the system helping them renew a passport is the same class of thing as the hypothetical entity that could, in theory, outthink every human institution. That conflation poisons every downstream conversation — about regulation, about safety research budgets, about liability, about what we should actually be worried about versus what makes for a good speech.
I saw this exact pattern in crypto. In 2021, every NFT project called itself 'the future of ownership.' Every DeFi protocol called itself 'the future of finance.' The words got so big that the actual mechanics — token unlocks, liquidity depth, smart contract upgradeability — became invisible. And when the words are bigger than the mechanisms, the downside always surprises the people holding the bag.
The rename is the tell. It's the signal that policy language is being written by communications strategists, not engineers or ethicists. When you see that in crypto, it means the code hasn't been audited. When you see it in government, it means the governance hasn't been designed.
The Regulatory Vacuum Nobody Wants to Name
Buried in the same reporting is a quote about not suppressing AI development and not bowing to 'fears about technology's impact on society.' I've been around enough policy documents to recognize this construction. It's the 'innovation first' argument, and it sounds reasonable until you ask a simple question: innovation first, then what?
In crypto, we lived this. The 2017 ICO boom was 'innovation first.' No securities law, no investor protection, no disclosure standards — just capital formation at the speed of a Telegram group. The result was a generation of retail investors, myself included, funding projects that were genuinely fraudulent at a rate somewhere north of ninety percent by most post-hoc studies. The market eventually self-corrected, but the self-correction was called 2018, and it cost real people real savings.
The AI equivalent is already taking shape. If the policy posture is that safety evaluation, red-teaming requirements, and deployment standards constitute 'suppression,' then the institutional infrastructure for catching failure modes before they scale is being defunded before it's built. There is an entire emerging field — AI safety, AI auditing, model evaluation, red-teaming — that exists precisely because smart people have identified failure modes that don't announce themselves. If government signaling treats those functions as friction rather than infrastructure, the private sector will follow the incentive gradient and deprioritize them too.
What makes this different from crypto is the blast radius. When a DeFi protocol fails, the losses are contained to the people who opted in. When a government services platform — the single consolidated entry point for federal benefits, immigration status, tax information, and God knows what else — fails, or leaks, or hallucinates, it doesn't just cost money. It denies people access to the services their taxes paid for. That's a different category of harm.
america.gov and the Single Point of Failure Problem
The consolidated platform is the part of this story that keeps me awake because it's the part I understand best from my own work. I've spent years auditing systems for institutional clients in Mexico, and the first question I always ask is: what's the failure mode?
When you consolidate federal services into a single AI-driven platform, you're not just building a website. You're building a trust boundary. Every citizen interaction — every query, every document upload, every identity verification — now flows through one system. That system's security posture, its data handling practices, its model provider, its query logging, its retention policy — all of these become the de facto privacy regime for an entire population's interactions with their own government.
And in the reporting, there's not a single mention of any of it. No privacy impact assessment. No statement about which model provider is being used, or whether citizen data trains future models. No adversarial testing framework. No mention of what happens when the system is wrong — and all AI systems are wrong with some regularity. No human-in-the-loop design for high-stakes decisions. No accessibility safeguards for populations that don't interact well with chat interfaces, which is a large fraction of the people who most need government services.
Here's the thing that really bothers me. When a private company deploys an AI system badly, customers can leave. They can switch banks, switch platforms, switch protocols. When a government consolidates services into a single AI-driven portal, citizens can't switch governments. The exit option that disciplines private-sector AI deployment simply doesn't exist in the public sector. That asymmetry demands a higher standard of design, not a lower one — and nothing in this reporting suggests a higher standard is being applied.
The Contrarian Read: This Is Not About AI at All
Here's where I want to push against the natural instinct of my own industry to read this as an AI story. It isn't. It's a sovereignty story wearing an AI costume.
Look at the structure of what's being done. A national government renames a technology using a term that implies civilizational supremacy. It consolidates citizen services into a single national platform. It frames the entire initiative as a matter of maintaining global leadership. It explicitly rejects the framing of technological risk as something to be managed rather than something to be dismissed.
This is the grammar of technological nationalism, and we've seen a version of it before. In crypto, the analogous move was the wave of 'national blockchain strategies' and 'CBDC initiatives' announced between 2019 and 2022. Most of them produced nothing operational. What they did produce was a rhetorical framework in which the nation-state claimed ownership over a technology that had been built specifically because it didn't require nation-state permission. The technology was supposed to be borderless. The politics of it made it territorial.
The same thing is happening here. 'Superintelligence' as a government brand does two things simultaneously. It claims that the nation-state is the rightful custodian of the most powerful technology in history. And it forecloses the possibility that the technology might need to be constrained, because you don't constrain something whose ownership you're claiming as a source of national power. That's the trap. Once the branding is 'ours and superior,' any safety framework that limits deployment is framed as a concession to competitors.
This is exactly what happened with crypto regulation in the 2017-2021 period. Every attempt to impose investor protections was met with the argument that regulation would push innovation to friendlier jurisdictions. The result was a decade of regulatory arbitrage and a global industry that still struggles to explain itself to institutional allocators. The AI industry is now walking into the same argument, and the government is the one making it.
What I'm Watching For (And What You Should Be)
I don't do short-term calls. I do structural positioning. My clients in Mexico City pay me to think in cycles, not in headlines. So here is the framework I'm applying to this story, and I'll be honest about my confidence level — which is moderate at best, because the primary source material is thin.
The first thing to watch is whether the executive order text actually materializes and what it contains. If 'Superintelligence' appears as an official designation in the federal register, that's a much bigger deal than a speech. If it doesn't — if this is a trial balloon — then the whole thing gets downgraded to messaging. The difference matters enormously. Branding is reversible. Codified language is not.
The second is the america.gov technical footprint. I want to know which cloud provider, which model API if any, what the data retention policy is, and whether there's an independent audit mechanism. If the answers are evasive, that tells you more than the answers would. In my experience, evasiveness about architecture is almost always a signal that the architecture has problems nobody wants documented.
The third is the comparison to the EU's regulatory posture. The EU AI Act is far from perfect, but it represents a genuine attempt to build safety infrastructure before deployment rather than after. If the US explicitly positions itself as the low-friction jurisdiction, we get regulatory arbitrage in AI the same way we got it in crypto — companies relocating to the permissive jurisdiction, safety research deprioritized, and a global patchwork that benefits velocity over depth. I've seen what that produces in my own industry. The aftermath — FTX, Terra, the whole 2022 mess — took two years and hundreds of billions of dollars to clean up. The AI version of that scenario plays out in systems that touch elections, healthcare, and critical infrastructure.
The fourth, and the one I care about most as someone with a cybersecurity background: what happens the first time an AI-driven government platform delivers a confidently wrong answer to a citizen who relies on it. Every model hallucinates. Every system fails. The question is whether we've built the human fallback layers that catch the failure before it becomes harm — or whether we've optimized those layers away in the name of efficiency, the way DeFi protocols optimized away manual review in the name of gas costs.
I've been wrong before. I bought EtherParty because the party was fun. I bought Bored Apes because they looked good in the gallery. I've made peace with being the person who makes those mistakes and then learns from them in public. But the mistakes I made were mine to make, with money I could afford to lose, in markets I chose to enter.
The people who will live with the consequences of an AI-driven federal services platform didn't choose that architecture. They won't get to audit it. They won't get to fork it. And when the branding says 'Superintelligence' and the reality is a probabilistic language model that sometimes makes things up, the gap between the two is where the real damage gets done.
Do you know which model is answering the question the next time you ask your government something important?