The White House just rebranded the future, but the market is calling their bluff with a 98% no-show rate.
The Summary
- Trump signed an executive order officially rebranding AI as "super intelligence" and gathered tech CEOs including Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and Anthropic's Dario Amodei to sign a "morally binding" AI safety pledge
- Despite the rebrand push and safety theater, only 2% of consumers are actually buying AI products
- The timing reveals a fundamental disconnect: Big Tech wants government cover for scaling, but can't get customers to care about the products that already exist
The Signal
The White House AI summit looked like a scene from a West Wing episode written by a venture capitalist. Every major tech CEO showed up to sign Trump's "morally binding" pledge on AI safety, a phrase that does exactly zero legal work but sounds good in a press release. The real story isn't the pageantry. It's what the pageantry is trying to cover up.
Trump's executive order doesn't just outline safety guidelines. It officially rebrands AI as "super intelligence", a marketing move disguised as policy. The timing is instructive. When adoption stalls, rebrand. When customers aren't biting, make it sound more impressive.
"Only 2% of consumers are buying AI products, despite every tech giant telling them the future has arrived."
Here's what the summit reveals about where we actually are:
- Big Tech wants regulatory air cover to keep scaling compute and raising capital
- The "safety" framing gives them permission to move fast while looking responsible
- Consumer adoption remains a rounding error, even as the infrastructure spend hits hundreds of billions
Meta and OpenAI are now putting "friendlier faces" on their AI products, which is what companies do when the initial pitch didn't land. ChatGPT became a curiosity, not a utility, for most people. The pivot from "this will change everything" to "look how helpful and non-threatening this is" tells you everything about how the first wave of consumer AI actually performed.
The gap between infrastructure investment and consumer uptake is historic. We're building the data centers, training the models, raising the capital, and signing the pledges. What we're not doing is convincing regular people they need any of this. The 2% adoption figure isn't a lagging indicator. It's a leading one. It says the product-market fit problem is real, not solved.
The Implication
If you're building in AI, the White House summit is noise. The 2% figure is signal. Consumer AI isn't failing because it's too complex or because people don't understand it. It's failing because the products don't solve problems people actually have, or they solve them worse than what already exists. The rebrand to "super intelligence" won't change that. Neither will friendlier chatbot personas.
The opportunity is in B2B agent automation, where the ROI case is clearer and the buyer actually understands what they're paying for. Consumer AI needs a reset, not a rebrand. Watch where the real money flows in 2025. It won't be toward making AI seem friendlier. It'll be toward making it actually useful.