en-US means “American English” rather than “United States of America”, doesn’t it? I don’t think there is an official name in American English.
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Checking the other use cases of a two-letter country code in names, I think most of them refer to the name in the respective country and not a local variant of the language. E.g. name:zh-Hant-HK or name:fr-CH.
Just to chuck in another example of this sort of thing, Node: Derry/Londonderry (267762522) | OpenStreetMap has both name:en-GB and name:en-IE on it.
Edit: To add a bit more detail - a challenge (with Derry/Londonderry) is that some of the local population would tend to use one name in English and some others the other. “GB” is doing a bit of heavy lifting here because it originates from “Great Britain” (the island, which Northern Ireland isn’t part of) but is used as the ISO country code for the UK (which Northern Ireland currently is). I’m not in the USA, but I get the feeling that even there acceptance of the name “Gulf of America” is not yet universal.
Time will tell whether it gains acceptance (and where it gains acceptance) - whether it will be another freedom fries or more like the North Sea, which was often referred to as the “German Ocean” in English before 1914.
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This is the collision I noted earlier between the scheme for dialects and the scheme for geopolitical naming disputes. Since the usage is so far from universal among speakers of American English in the United States, an *_name:en-US of some sort (alternative? official? national?) would be more accurate than a plain name:en-US. The authorities haven’t managed to turn this into a Northern Irish situation yet. alt_name itself is basically nothing more than a list of search keywords, but it doesn’t hurt to further qualify it by language and country.
In case you’re wondering, the feature’s other alt_name comes from Vietnamese: older speakers in the U.S. have a starkly different name for “Mexico” than younger speakers in Vietnam. Vietnam’s education and foreign affairs ministries have still two more official spellings for the country’s name, but so far we haven’t bothered to tag them on this feature.
The Vietnamese Wikipedia recently voted to stop acknowledging most Vietnamese exonyms in favor of more “modern” English or the local language, leaving Wiktionary and OSM responsible for informing people about the exonyms that people actually use in real life.
Ironically, Spanish-language media keeps having to explain why Gulf of America is problematic in English. In Spanish, América refers to the Americas as a whole, not the U.S. specifically. If one didn’t know any better, one would think it’s a gift to Cuba! Of course, this doesn’t justify the attempt to rename the gulf, since the intention is abundantly clear, but it does leave the name vulnerable to others reclaiming it for themselves. A more erudite politician might’ve chosen Gulf of Florida, which at least has a historical basis, dating to around the same time as Gulf of Mexico. But here we are.
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A recurring topic in the international telegram group 
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I might be alone in this but, certainly in my usage of British English, “America” to refer to the US alone is somewhere between lazy and inaccurate, and were I subbing an article for publication I’d have changed it. I would generally prefer “the States” or “the US”. I’d be mildly interested to know what other British English speakers think.
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Can’t offer any scientific evidence…
Ze Germans (being educated with Her Majesty’s English) generally refer to the USA when saying “Amerika”
It may be that I am in the United States so I’m taking a biased sample, but no one here refers to the Americas as such casually. If a US citizen was asked off the street to name the land masses they’d likely say “that’s North and South America” (assuming that they know geography enough) like we are taught in elementary school when learning the continents. That’s why I imagine so many hear “America” here in the US and think USA not “The Americas”. Though I did get a good chuckle when this EO came out that someone should tell our President there’s more than the USA in America!
The wikidata let us see how various cultures define the America continent and subcontinents 
See the wikidata for America and strangely as this is the English version, it is titled Americas.
For what it is worth, USGS National Map still shows the Gulf of Mexico and Denali.
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Given that we are all “geographically curious”, we are probably not a good sample.
The BBC style guide says don’t refer to the US as America “on first reference unless it is clear from the context that is what is being referred to”. The Australian version (ABC) also give the same advice. The ABC also goes on to emphasise that someone from Canada is a Canadian (emphasis in the original, I guess something didn’t go well in the past…).
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But somebody from just south of there isn’t a USAnian! 
It is inaccurate, and I think we know that, but I’m quite sure that British people call it that all the time regardless.
More or less the same in the German speaking world. When someone colloquially says America/Amerika they usually mean the USA. However, in official or more formal settings it’s nearly always called ‘USA’.
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Let’s just call it Gulf of Cuba and be done with it /s
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Well, this is a fun development:
Archived article text as of 2025-01-28, 01:26 UTC
The Trump administration declared on Friday that the Gulf of Mexico had been renamed the Gulf of America, but popular mapping services from Google and Apple have continued showing the old name.
On Monday, Google said it would update its maps to display Gulf of America as soon as the U.S. government updated its official maps.
“We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources,” the company said in a post on X.
President Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20, his first day in office, to rename the gulf, in addition to changing the name of the tallest mountain in North America. That peak, which had been known by the Alaska Native name Denali since 2015, was renamed Mount McKinley, an earlier name.
The U.S. Department of the Interior said on Friday that it was implementing the executive order, but that official government maps had not yet been updated from the Geographic Names Information System, or G.N.I.S., which is a part of the U.S. Geological Survey.
Google said that once the G.N.I.S. made the change, it would “quickly” follow suit in its popular Maps application, which is a crucial source of information about geography for more than two billion users. The company said it would also change the name of Denali, which is in Alaska, to Mount McKinley, in accordance with the new administration’s change.
While Google users in the United States will see the Gulf of America name, those in Mexico will continue to see “Gulf of Mexico,” which is how that country refers to the body of water.
Users elsewhere in the world will see both names side by side, the company said in what it described as a “longstanding practice.” The Gulf of Mexico name will appear first for these users, followed by the Gulf of America name in parentheses, said two people with knowledge of the company’s plans, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Google declined to comment on the order of the names. Apple representatives did not respond to a request for comment on whether the company would adopt the Gulf of America name for its Maps application.
Google Maps routinely uses different names to refer to the same places, depending on the location of a user, especially if there is a geopolitical dispute, three people with knowledge of the company’s policies said. The body of water between Saudi Arabia and Iran has been subject to naming disputes for decades. Google labels the gulf under two names for international users: “Persian Gulf (Arabian Gulf).” In Arab countries near the body of water, Google Maps calls it the Arabian Gulf.
When the Obama administration changed the name of the Alaska mountain from Mount McKinley to Denali in August 2015, Google updated Maps to reflect the name change three days later.
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One option to represent this name is to do something like Nathaniel’s disputed territories tagging as discussed in nvk's Diary | August 2019 disputed boundaries update | OpenStreetMap.
In other words: we use tagging to say that the US calls it “Gulf of America” in English and everyone else calls it “Gulf of Mexico” in English. This gets around the American English vs. English problem.
This is unfortunately not uncommon for Google Maps. They show disputed bordered based on local custom.
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name:us=Gulf of America while name:en=Gulf of Mexico?
Sorry, that was supposed to say “we use this tagging”, referring to the disputed tagging mentioned in the linked diary.