theSIGNAL TECHNOLOGY
5 October 2026
"To name a thing is to begin deciding what it may become."
NEWSBUSINESSTECHNOLOGYWORLDSCIENCECULTUREENVIRONMENTSPORT
Photo: Sandisk / Unsplash
A White House briefing room screen displays the newly adopted term "Super Intelligence."
🏛️
4
officials named to the new AI taskforce
Discuss
  • Can renaming a technology genuinely change public attitudes toward it, or only the official language around it?
  • Should AI safety rules rest on voluntary pacts between companies, or on binding law passed by legislatures?
Technology

Trump Renames AI, Then Builds a Taskforce Around It

A new White House body will oversee what the president now insists on calling "Super Intelligence," testing whether a word change can reshape an industry.

On 29 September, Donald Trump signed an executive order that did something unusual for a piece of federal paperwork: it tried to retire a word. From now on, the order instructed, US government agencies must stop writing "artificial intelligence" and start writing "Super Intelligence" instead, in every report, website and official letter. The president had already said in public that "artificial" made the technology sound fake. Now the rebrand has a chain of command.

That chain runs through a newly announced body called the Super Intelligence Force, which Trump unveiled on social media on Sunday. It will be led by Jay Clayton, the Director of National Intelligence, a former US attorney who once prosecuted the drug-trafficking case against Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro and who has described AI as something that is "both an opportunity and a threat." Joining him are the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Andrew Ferguson; the Pentagon's research chief, Emil Michael; and the head of the federal personnel office, Scott Kupor. The group answers directly to Trump and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and is tasked with coordinating government contact with everyone from religious organizations to the companies building the systems themselves.

The taskforce arrives days after executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX and Google signed what Trump called a "morally binding pact" on safety, a voluntary gesture that critics say substitutes for actual law. Trump has consistently resisted calls, including from some of those same executives, for binding regulation, preferring industry self-policing.

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When something's both an opportunity and a threat, you better get your arms around it.
Jay Clayton, Director of National Intelligence
Technology

Google Halts Bug Bounty Over AI Spam

Since October 1, researchers hunting flaws in Google's open source software have had nowhere to send their findings. Google has paused its Open Source Software Vulnerability Rewards Program, citing a flood of automated, AI-generated reports, most of them worthless. Engineers in California and volunteer maintainers worldwide were reportedly drowning in submissions filled with hallucinated vulnerabilities. Google called it a "significant rise" in invalid reports and promised an update by early 2027. The irony is sharp: tools built to strengthen security are now straining the humans meant to use them.…
  • Will AI-generated noise eventually break crowdsourced security research entirely?
Technology

AI Child Abuse Images Surge Past Last Year's Total

In just six months, investigators in London assessed 6,310 illegal AI-generated images of child abuse—40% more than all of 2025 combined. The Internet Watch Foundation says this proves voluntary safeguards are failing, since most victims pictured were girls aged seven to thirteen. Britain already criminalises building or sharing such models, with sentences up to five years. Yet ministers remain cautious, testing new rules only against one question: will they actually make people safer?…
  • Should AI companies face criminal liability for unsafe model design?
ASIA · Technology
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WORLD · Technology
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theSIGNAL IN THE LAB
1VOCABULARY
executive ordertaskforce
morally binding pactself-policingsafeguards
bug bountyhallucinated vulnerabilities
2GRAMMAR FOCUS
Inversion — negative adverbials (Not only did..., Hardly had...)
When a negative or limiting adverbial (e.g. Not only, Hardly, No sooner, Never, Rarely) begins a sentence, the subject and auxiliary verb must be inverted, as in a question.
did · had · has · was · could · would
  1. Not only Trump rename the technology, but he also created a taskforce to enforce it.
  2. Hardly the executive order been signed when agencies began changing their official language.
  3. Never the Internet Watch Foundation seen such a sharp rise in illegal AI-generated images.
  4. No sooner Google paused the bounty program than it was flooded with complaints from researchers.
  5. Not only the images increase in number, but the age of the victims also shocked investigators.
  6. Rarely a voluntary safety pact satisfied critics who demand binding regulation.
3PHRASAL VERBS
Match the phrasal verb to its definition. All six appear in today's articles.
  1. retire (a word)
  2. arrive at/after
  3. catch up
  4. drown in (submissions)
  5. spread from... to...
4CRITICAL THINKING
The IWF report states most child abuse image victims were girls aged seven to thirteen, while Google's bounty program is being flooded with worthless AI spam. Both stories suggest AI systems are producing harmful or useless output faster than humans can manage it. What does this pattern suggest about the gap between how quickly AI tools are deployed and how quickly safeguards are built?
5CREATIVE · HEADLINES
Write a headline for the top story in each of the following styles. One line each, no explanation:
  • TABLOID NEWSPAPER
  • LUXURY MAGAZINE
  • ACTIVIST BLOG
6WRITING
Imagine you are a mid-level civil servant who must now rewrite every government document to replace 'artificial intelligence' with 'Super Intelligence.' Write a short memo to your team explaining the change and how to handle public questions about it.
7DEGREES OF EXTREMITY
Complete each ladder from mild to strong.
  • concerned→→
  • problem→→
  • dislike→→
  • change→→
  • risky→→
  • question→→
8SPEAKING
  1. Is 'Super Intelligence' a fitting name for this technology?
  2. Should tech firms self-report failures like Google's spam flood?
  3. How should platforms verify ages to protect children online?
  4. Can five-year sentences actually deter AI-generated abuse content?