The plain-English guide to superintelligence
What it means, how it might arrive, who is building it, and where the UK stands.
Two meanings, one word. Since September 2026 the US administration has used "Super Intelligence" as its name for artificial intelligence in general. In AI research, superintelligence has long meant something narrower: an AI that outperforms the best human minds at nearly every task that matters, and which does not exist yet. This site covers both, and keeps them apart. Start with the difference.
The Frontier supercomputer, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Photo: OLCF at ORNL, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).
Why Trump wants to rename AI "Super Intelligence": a dated timeline
What was said, when, on which platform, and what has actually changed. Kept as a neutral record and updated as the story develops.
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Explore the guide
- The core guideWhat superintelligence is, how it differs from AI and AGI, how and when it might arrive, the risks and attempts to control it, the organisations building frontier AI, and a glossary.
- The UK angleHow AI is regulated, what the AI Security Institute does, what the government is actually delivering, and whether Britain could build AGI, and the Artificial Superintelligence Bill.
- The rename sagaA neutral, dated record of the move to rename artificial intelligence "Super Intelligence".
The three terms, in order of capability
- AI
- Software that does tasks we associate with intelligence. It exists, and has for decades.
- AGI
- Roughly any intellectual task a person can do. Whether today's systems are close is disputed.
- Superintelligence
- Greatly exceeds the best human minds in virtually all domains. Hypothetical; does not exist.
Read the explainer. Then: What is AGI? · AGI vs superintelligence · Who is building it? · When could it happen?
Recently reviewed
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The idea that AI improving AI could compress years of progress into months: where it comes from, why automated AI research revived it in 2026, the bottlenecks and the objections. A hypothesis, not a forecast.
The core guide · reviewed 3 October 2026What are the risks of superintelligence?
Misuse, accidents, misalignment, concentration of power, cyber and military risks, economic disruption and loss of control, each separated into what is observed in today's AI and what is argued about hypothetical superintelligence.
The core guide · reviewed 3 October 2026
Can superintelligence be controlled?
The control problem in plain English: corrigibility and the off switch, sandboxing and the 2026 escape incidents, monitoring, interpretability, compute limits and governance, and why none has been shown to work on a system smarter than its overseers.
The core guide · reviewed 3 October 2026OpenAI and AGI: what is it trying to build?
What OpenAI says it is building, how it defines AGI, why its leaders now talk about superintelligence, what its models have demonstrated, and how its safety approach and the September 2026 pause fit in.
The core guide · reviewed 28 October 2026China's frontier AI labs: who is building advanced AI?
DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Zhipu AI, Alibaba's Qwen, ByteDance Seed and MiniMax: what China's leading AI developers say they are building, what independent testing shows, and what cannot be known.
The core guide · reviewed 28 October 2026
The Artificial Superintelligence Bill explained
The Private Member's Bill introduced on 8 September 2026 to ban artificial superintelligence in the UK: who introduced it, what it proposes, its parliamentary stage, and why it is not law.
The UK angle · reviewed 28 October 2026
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