Trump has of course always had an affinity for expressing dominance and blunt superlatives, and so, we have artificial intelligence renamed “super intelligence” or “S-I” on US government documents a la Lake Ontario nominally becoming “Lake America.” Trump means “super” in a way that’s different than the Silicon Valley guys who use “artificial super-intelligence” or “ASI”; it’s vibes-based and dependent on jettisoning the “artificial.” It’s “super” as in “Superman.” (I’m also willing to bet every last one of my Trump Coins that there was at least one failed effort from the Trump brain trust to try to work out how they might shoehorn American Intelligence or Make Intelligence Great Again into the equation somehow.)

All this has garnered plenty of justified snickering from the chattering classes, but it’s worth noting that “artificial intelligence” was itself coined as a branding exercise, and then used to tell, and embellish, a story.

“I invented the term artificial intelligence,” the Stanford computer scientist John McCarthy said in 1973, “and I invented it because we had to do something when we were trying to get money for a summer study in 1956.” A more pedestrian, jargon-filled proposal had previously failed to get traction; “artificial intelligence” turned committee heads and got the funding. Now, angling for some summer study funding is on a much smaller scale than the trillion-dollar value-inflating proclamations of our AI companies today, but the anecdote shows the extent to which “AI” has always been a cultural construct and has served as a useful narrative device.

And the narrative is really heating up these days, is it not. In Trump’s telling, AI is a vector of American power, one that must not be restrained by “globalist schemes” to regulate it, as he put it. This was essentially the same stance that Vance took last year, when he delivered his first big speech abroad as vice president; that AI is a vessel for American dominance, that it’s not to be tied down with regulation, and that everyone else (especially Europe) should either get on board or out of the way.

It has its share of adherents, especially on the tech right, but the story about an unconstrained AI superpower makes for a less palatable narrative coming on the heels of weeks of sustained discourse, fanned by the leaders in the AI companies themselves, about another one: That AI may soon exterminate all of humanity. With a public that’s still unsure of how to process that significantly more alarming narrative, and Trump’s own base increasingly out of step with him on the issue, the AI-as-nationalist-dominator thrust is dying on the vine. (It also surely does not help that even diehard Trump fans may struggle to see how “super intelligence” benefits them, as their electricity bills are getting bigger, the war in Iran drags on, and everyone’s worried about losing their jobs.)

So it’s little surprise that the story preferred by the media appears to be that Trump has an opportunity to breach “AI safety” issues with China during Xi’s visit this week, despite Trump’s obvious distaste for the notion, and the chances of anything substantive emerging in that department remaining slim.