The naming fight is the least interesting thing happening in AI right now, and the number buried underneath it is the most interesting. TechCrunch reported in 2026 that only 2% of consumers are buying what’s now being called “AI, call it Super Intelligence.” That’s the headline I’d put on a billboard. Not the rebrand. The 2%.
For context on the rebrand itself: President Trump announced that the U.S. government will officially refer to artificial intelligence as “Super Intelligence,” calling it “much bigger than internet.” Several major American tech company leaders signed a White House accord around it. Worth being precise about scope, because a lot of coverage wasn’t: the order applies to terminology used by the U.S. executive branch. It does not rename AI worldwide, existing laws aren’t rewritten, and previously issued documents don’t retroactively change.
So the government changed a word in its own paperwork. Meanwhile, 2% of consumers are reaching for their wallets.
What a 2% number actually tells a reviewer
I test AI tools for a living. I install them, break them, cancel the subscriptions, and write down what happened. And I can tell you that a 2% consumer buy rate doesn’t surprise me even slightly, because the gap between what these tools demo and what they do on a Tuesday afternoon is still wide.
A few caveats before anyone quotes me. That 2% figure appears in the TechCrunch piece and, as far as I can tell, nowhere else in the reporting around the rebrand. I don’t have the methodology, the sample, the definition of “buying,” or the time window. Does it mean paid consumer subscriptions? Any purchase decision influenced by AI branding? Hardware? I genuinely don’t know, and anyone telling you they do is filling in blanks. Treat it as a directional signal, not a verified market-share stat.
Directionally, though, it tracks with what I see in my own testing queue.
Why normal people aren’t paying
Here’s what I keep running into when I evaluate consumer-facing AI products:
- The free tier solves the actual problem. Most people’s AI use case is “help me word this email” or “summarize this thing.” Free tools do that. Paying $20 a month to do it slightly faster is a hard sell to someone who isn’t billing by the hour.
- Reliability is uneven in ways that erode trust fast. A tool that’s excellent four times and wrong on the fifth doesn’t feel like a solid tool. It feels like a tool you have to supervise, and supervision is work.
- Setup cost is real. Connecting accounts, granting permissions, learning what prompts work. That’s friction most consumers won’t absorb for a maybe.
- The pitch keeps escalating while the product doesn’t. Every cycle, the language gets bigger. The output gets incrementally better. People notice that mismatch.
Calling the category “Super Intelligence” is an escalation of the pitch. It does nothing about the four bullets above. If anything, it widens the mismatch, because the gap between a name like that and a chatbot that forgot what you said six messages ago is pretty easy to feel.
The branding move isn’t aimed at consumers anyway
I don’t think the rebrand was ever meant to move retail buyers. A terminology change inside the executive branch, co-signed by major tech companies at the White House, reads like positioning for policy, procurement, and international framing. Trump’s own comparison, “much bigger than internet,” is the language of national strategy, not a product launch.
Which is fine. Governments pick terms. But it means the 2% number and the rebrand are answers to two completely different questions, and coverage that staples them together creates a false sense that one is a response to the other.
What I’d actually watch
If you build or buy AI tools, the useful question isn’t what we’re calling the category. It’s whether the paid tier earns its keep on an ordinary day. From the reviewer’s chair, the products that convert aren’t the ones with the biggest claims. They’re the ones that do one annoying task completely, every time, without me checking the work.
That’s an unglamorous bar. It’s also the bar that turns 2% into a bigger number, and no amount of renaming gets you over it.
My advice to readers hasn’t changed: run the free tier for two weeks on real work before you pay for anything. If you can’t articulate what the upgrade buys you, you’re part of the 98%, and you’re being rational about it.
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