On September 29, after a summit with tech executives at the White House, President Trump signed an executive order instructing the entire executive branch to stop saying “artificial intelligence.”
From now on, federal agencies are to call it “Super Intelligence,” abbreviated SI. The order covers official correspondence, public communications, agency websites, reports and policy documents. The terms “artificial intelligence” and “AI” are, in the order’s framing, no longer to be acknowledged.
Nothing about any actual system changed on September 29. That is the first thing to be clear about, and the second is stranger: the word the administration picked was already in use, and it means something quite specific that these systems demonstrably are not.
The short version
- Signed September 29, 2026, following a White House gathering of tech industry leaders
- What it does: directs executive branch agencies to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in place of “artificial intelligence” and “AI”
- Scope: correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents and other non-statutory materials
- What it does not do: change any system’s capability, any funding line, or any safety requirement
- Statutory definition carries over. Federal “Super Intelligence” initially inherits the existing legal definition of artificial intelligence
- 60 day clock: White House officials must draft proposed legislative language to define “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in federal law
- Pushback was immediate. California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a counter order keeping the term AI in his state
- The term was taken. In AI research, “superintelligence” means a system exceeding human cognitive ability across essentially all domains
What the order actually changes
Executive orders about language are a real category of government action, and they are usually less consequential than they sound. This one is a good example, because the mechanics are narrow.
Agencies must swap the vocabulary in the documents they control. They cannot swap it in statute, because a president cannot rewrite laws Congress passed, which is why the order limits itself to non-statutory materials and leaves the existing legal definition in place for now. That is the loose end the 60 day deadline is meant to tie up: officials are to draft language Congress could pass to make the new term legally real.
Until Congress acts, the federal government is in an odd position. The thing is called SI in the press release and AI in the law.
The term was already occupied
This is the substantive objection, and it is not a semantic quibble. “Superintelligence” is established terminology in AI research with a precise meaning: a system whose cognitive performance exceeds that of humans across virtually every domain.
It is a threshold concept. It describes something that does not exist, that researchers argue about the feasibility and timeline of, and that an entire field of safety work is organized around preventing or surviving. Congress has used the word in that sense too. There are bills on the table, which we covered when Congress ended up with two competing AI bills, one to ban superintelligence and one to mandate a kill switch, and in those bills the word points at a specific future capability, not at the chatbot in your browser.
The order now applies that same word to everything. A fraud detection model at the IRS is Super Intelligence. A document classifier at the State Department is Super Intelligence. The administration’s stated reasoning is that the technology increasingly does more than imitate or automate narrow slices of human intelligence, and that the old label undersells it.
The practical consequence is that a term used to describe a hypothetical and dangerous threshold now also describes routine software. That makes it considerably harder to write a law about the threshold, which is awkward timing given that drafting such a law is what the order’s own 60 day deadline instructs officials to do.
| “Superintelligence” in AI research and in pending bills | “Super Intelligence” in federal usage after this order | |
|---|---|---|
| What it names | A system exceeding human ability across virtually every domain | Any AI system an agency touches, however routine |
| Does it exist? | No. It is a future threshold | Yes. Thousands of deployments already |
| Typical example | A system that out-thinks humans at everything at once | A fraud detection model, a document classifier |
| Why the word | To mark a capability line worth legislating ahead of | To signal ambition and national progress |
| Legal standing | Being defined in proposed legislation | Inherits the existing AI definition for now |
Why this matters beyond wording. Safety regulation depends on being able to distinguish a spreadsheet macro from a system that outperforms humans at everything. If one phrase covers both, every future statute needs a new term for the dangerous case, or it needs carve-outs. Vocabulary is the raw material of law, and collapsing a distinction is not a neutral act even when the intent is just branding.
The reaction
Opposition arrived quickly and from more than one direction.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the move showed the president was not serious about the risks the technology poses. That criticism tracks a pattern Warner and others have pressed on for a year, and it echoes the frustration we reported when Geoffrey Hinton gave Congress one year to act while every AI bill on the table was heading for expiry.
The sharpest response came from California. Governor Gavin Newsom signed his own executive order rejecting the rebrand and directing his state to keep saying AI. The language was blunt: the California order characterized the renaming as an attempt to distract from what it called an impotent and craven failure to address documented security and safety risks.
So the United States now has a federal government that officially says SI and its largest state economy officially saying AI, which is a genuine problem for anyone writing joint federal and state documentation.
The polling problem underneath it
Several outlets connected the timing to the administration’s standing on this issue, and the numbers explain why.
A Quinnipiac survey put approval of the president’s handling of AI at 25 percent. A Gallup poll of 1,000 adults found 71 percent of Americans opposed to AI data centers being built in their local area.
Those two figures describe a public that is not persuaded, and the discontent is mostly concrete rather than abstract. Data centers mean construction, power draw, water use and local electricity prices. Renaming the category does not address a single one of those, which is the gap critics have pointed at: the complaint is about effects, and the response was about vocabulary.
It is worth noting a second thing happened at that summit. AI industry leaders signed a separate safety accord alongside the order, which is the part with potential substance, and which got almost no attention next to the renaming. That ordering of coverage is itself a reasonable critique of the announcement strategy.
How this fits the administration’s AI record
The rebrand is consistent with a posture that has been visible for a while: enthusiastic about capability and acceleration, dismissive of the safety framing.
The clearest previous example was the president calling AI safety a hoax during an on stage phone call with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who agreed with him. We wrote that up at the time in our piece on Trump calling AI safety a hoax on Jensen Huang’s speakerphone, and the through line to a term like “Super Intelligence” is not hard to trace. The new word is optimistic by construction. It describes the ceiling rather than the mechanism.
Whether that framing helps the administration is a separate question. “Artificial intelligence” is cold and slightly clinical, which is arguably a problem if you want people enthusiastic. But it is also a phrase the whole world uses, and unilaterally leaving it behind creates friction with allies, standards bodies, international agreements and every company that has to file documents in both vocabularies.
What to actually watch
- The 60 day legislative draft. This is the only part with teeth. What definition the White House proposes for “Super Intelligence” will reveal whether this is pure branding or the opening move in redefining what gets regulated
- Whether Congress picks it up. Without legislation, the statutory term stays “artificial intelligence” and the rename remains cosmetic
- How agencies handle existing law. Staff will be writing SI in a memo about a statute that says AI, and at some point a court will have to care
- Whether other states follow California. A patchwork of state level vocabulary would make compliance paperwork genuinely painful
- The safety accord from the summit. Largely overshadowed, possibly the only durable outcome of the day
- What researchers do with the word. If “superintelligence” now means ordinary software in federal usage, the field will need a replacement term for the thing it was actually worried about
The bottom line
An executive order cannot make a model smarter, and this one does not try. It changes what the federal government calls a technology, inherits the old legal definition while it does so, and sets a two month deadline to go ask Congress to make it official.
The defensible read is that language shapes how institutions think, and an administration is entitled to choose its framing. The problem is the specific word. “Superintelligence” was already load bearing, used by researchers and by Congress to name a capability nobody has built and many people are trying to legislate about in advance. Applying it to everything, including a classifier that sorts forms, does not elevate the software. It just removes a useful distinction at the exact moment the government says it wants to write that distinction into law.
Meanwhile the things the polling says people actually object to, the data centers and the power bills and the unaddressed risks, are all still sitting there, now described with a more impressive noun.
Sources and further reading
- White House fact sheet: President Donald J. Trump inaugurates the era of Super Intelligence
- Forbes: Trump signs executive order renaming AI to Super Intelligence, here is what it changes
- CNBC: Trump tries to rename AI super intelligence as polls show him sinking on the issue
- IAPP: AI by any other name, the White House directs agencies into the era of super intelligence
- Nextgov: White House unveils super intelligence executive order and industry accord
- TechRepublic: Trump signs Super Intelligence order, what actually changes for AI
- The Register: Trump decrees the era of Super Intelligence upon us
- UNILAD Tech: Donald Trump has signed order renaming AI to Super Intelligence
