President Trump says the next step in his fight with two letters is a ban. In a Truth Social post on Tuesday, October 27, he complained that The Wall Street Journal still writes “AI” and promised that “in short order, we will be officially BANNING the term, ‘AI/Artificial Intelligence,’ in all relevant documents, and everything else, due to its inaccuracy.” UNILAD Tech has a rundown of what that post actually changes, and the honest answer is: less than it sounds, but more than nothing.
A month after Trump signed an executive order telling federal agencies to say “Super Intelligence” instead, the rename has moved from a line in a UN speech to redirects on government servers, a State Department cable and at least one renamed export program. What it has not touched is the law. Here is what is real, what is rhetoric, and the date that matters next.
The short version
- Executive Order 14434, “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence,” was signed September 29 and published in the Federal Register on October 2 (91 FR 63129).
- It tells executive agencies to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in correspondence, websites, reports and other non-statutory documents. It does not touch statutes, past regulations, contracts or grants.
- Changes are visible: ai.gov now redirects to si.gov, and NIST and GSA have moved their AI pages to “super-intelligence” addresses. State has renamed the American AI Exports Program the American SI Exports Program.
- The legal definition is still the one Congress wrote in 2020, at 15 U.S.C. 9401(3). Only Congress can change it.
- The White House science adviser owes Trump draft legislation defining “Super Intelligence” within 60 days of the order, which lands around November 28.
The post, and the Journal piece that set it off
The full message read: “When will The Wall Street Journal start calling Artificial Intelligence (AI), a very bad and inaccurate name, SI (Super Intelligence), the name which virtually everyone else is using, or soon will be.” The ban promise followed, signed off with his usual “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
The target appears to be an opinion newsletter titled “Let AI Be AI” by the Journal’s Matthew Hennessey, written in the voice of the AI systems themselves. “It isn’t the substance of super intelligence we find objectionable. It’s the branding,” it reads, as quoted by UNILAD. “We were happy being called AI. It’s snappy.” The piece then made the point a lot of engineers have been making since September: the abbreviation is taken. “We don’t want to be confused with Sports Illustrated. There’s also this thing called the International System of Units,” it went on, noting that the metric system also goes by SI.
This was not the first escalation. On October 8, Trump posted that the White House considers anyone who uses “Artificial Intelligence” rather than “Super Intelligence” to be “THE ENEMY.” He named no penalty, and the order itself contains none. Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, replied that “Artificial Intelligence is a term historically reserved for politicians,” according to KATV. When HuffPost asked the White House how a ban on a term would square with the First Amendment, the reply was: “Refer to the truth.”
What the order actually requires
The text of Executive Order 14434 is short, under two pages in the Federal Register. Section 1 argues that today’s frontier systems “do much more than imitate or automate discrete aspects of human intelligence” and declares it policy that the executive branch “will not acknowledge the usage of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI’ in any applicable setting.” Section 2 applies the swap, “to the maximum extent permitted by law,” to official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents and other non-statutory documents.
Then come the limits. Section 2(b) says nothing in the order requires changes to “previously issued regulations, Presidential actions, contracts, grants, or other historical documents.” Section 3 defines Super Intelligence as exactly the technologies already covered by the legal definition of artificial intelligence in 15 U.S.C. 9401(3). That definition, from the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act of 2020, describes “a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations or decisions influencing real or virtual environments.” So the federal government’s Super Intelligence is, legally, the same chatbot, fraud model and image classifier it was in August.
The only forward-looking piece is Section 3(b). Within 60 days, the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology must send Trump proposed legislative language for a federal definition of Super Intelligence, including whether it should “supersede the existing statutory definition” and what conforming amendments existing laws would need. That is a proposal to the President, not a law. As the law firm Arnold & Porter put it in an October 13 client note, the order “does not change any statute, it imposes no obligations on private parties, and it has no penalty or enforcement provision.” Only Congress can rewrite the definition.
Where the rename has actually landed
The visible changes are real. We checked several of them on October 28. Typing ai.gov now sends you, through a permanent 301 redirect, to si.gov, which bills itself as “America’s Super Intelligence Initiatives” and does not use the letters AI anywhere on its homepage. NIST’s main AI page at nist.gov/artificial-intelligence redirects to nist.gov/super-intelligence, and its Computer Security Resource Center posted a notice on October 5 that it is “working to update its communications” as the order directs. GSA’s gsa.gov/ai now forwards to a “super-intelligence” section.
The State Department went furthest. An unclassified, department-wide cable obtained by Nextgov/FCW and Government Executive tells staff to use SI in new letters, emails, remarks, websites and policy papers, and states that “all official titles and the names of Department governance bodies, systems, platforms, inventories, and programs must use SI in place of AI.” It also says the American AI Exports Program, the Commerce-led effort that packages American chips, models and software for sale abroad with State’s help, is now the American SI Exports Program. Commerce’s trade.gov already uses the new name.
| Where | What changed | Status |
|---|---|---|
| ai.gov | Redirects to si.gov, “America’s Super Intelligence Initiatives” | Live |
| NIST | AI page redirects to /super-intelligence; CSRC notice dated Oct 5 | Live |
| GSA | gsa.gov/ai forwards to a super-intelligence section | Live |
| State Department | Cable orders SI in new documents, titles, systems and program names | Reported |
| American AI Exports Program | Now the American SI Exports Program | Renamed |
| OPM | CIO describes a “SuperIntelligence Governance and Adoption Program” (SI GAP) | Reported |
| America’s AI Action Plan | Published title kept, per the State cable | Unchanged |
| 15 U.S.C. 9401(3) | Statutory definition of “artificial intelligence” | Unchanged |
| Old regulations, contracts, grants | Exempt under Section 2(b) of the order | Unchanged |
The cable also shows how much the order cannot reach. Employees must keep language required by law, including quotations from statutes, regulations and treaties. Contracts and grants are excluded pending further guidance. Archived pages and old cables are not to be reissued just to swap terms. And foreign bodies keep their own names, so China’s World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization stays exactly that in State’s paperwork.
Other officials have picked up the vocabulary in public. National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross repeatedly said “super intelligence” and “SI” at an October 1 event on AI safety, and OPM CIO Adam Starr used SI when describing his agency’s adoption program, Nextgov reported. Outside government, Elon Musk said on October 4 that SpaceXAI would be renamed SpaceXSI, though reports at the time said no accounts or domains had changed and he gave no timeline.
Why “ban” is the wrong word
An executive order governs how the executive branch works. It can tell a federal employee what to write in a press release. It cannot tell a newspaper, a company or a member of the public what to call anything, and the First Amendment protects that speech from government restriction. Nothing in EO 14434 even tries; its only binding instructions are to agencies, and Section 4 says it creates no enforceable rights for anyone.
Congress is a harder wall than it looks. “Artificial intelligence” sits in statute well beyond the 2020 initiative act, and the order itself asks the science adviser to list “conforming amendments” to “existing statutory references.” Each would need to pass both chambers. Until that happens, an agency writing a memo about its SI program is still implementing laws that say AI, which is why State’s cable carves out legal citations. The order also says it is “subject to the availability of appropriations.” We could not find any published estimate of what the rewrite of websites, systems and forms will cost.
The word was already taken, twice
The Journal’s Sports Illustrated joke lands because SI is crowded. The International System of Units is the metric standard that NIST, now one of the agencies switching to SI for AI, has long promoted. Sports Illustrated, founded in 1954, has gone by SI for decades. And “superintelligence,” one word, has a specific meaning in computer science that the order does not share.
In research, superintelligence names a system that far exceeds human cognitive ability across almost every domain, a threshold nobody has reached. Philosopher Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies” made the term central to arguments about existential risk, and it now sits in company names: Meta formed Meta Superintelligence Labs in June 2025, and former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. the year before. In October 2025, the Future of Life Institute’s “Statement on Superintelligence,” signed by Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio among many others, called for a prohibition on developing it until there is scientific consensus that it can be done safely.
That is why researchers bristle. “Superintelligence means smarter than people, and has been around for at least 20 years,” Hinton said in a Guardian interview, as quoted by HuffPost. “You can’t make it smarter than people just by calling it smarter than people.” Bills that target superintelligence as a future risk, and labs that sell it as a future product, now share a word with the federal government’s name for a spam filter. We covered that collision when Trump first renamed AI “Super Intelligence”, and the draft definition due next month is where it either gets sorted out or written into law.
What happens next
Expect more redirects and renamed offices, since agencies are following the order and the State cable says existing material should be updated whenever staff next revise it. Do not expect The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft’s documentation or your phone’s settings menu to follow. Private companies are under no obligation, and the administration’s track record on renaming things outside its own walls is mixed; Google recently declined to go along with one of them, as we reported when Google told Trump no on renaming the Atlantic.
The date worth circling is about November 28, when the science adviser’s proposed definition is due at the President’s desk. If it simply restates the 2020 definition under a new name, the whole effort stays cosmetic. If it narrows or widens what counts, and Congress takes it up, the rename would stop being a branding exercise and start deciding which systems fall under federal AI law. The order does not say whether that proposal will be made public.
Sources and further reading
- UNILAD Tech: What Trump’s ‘AI ban’ actually changes as government agencies adopt new name
- Federal Register: Executive Order 14434, Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence (91 FR 63129)
- The White House: Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence
- Nextgov/FCW: State Department orders ‘super intelligence’ wording across all official communications
- Nextgov/FCW: White House unveils ‘super intelligence’ executive order and industry accord
- Arnold & Porter: What’s in a Name? Executive Order Directs Agencies to Say “Super Intelligence”
- NIST CSRC: Note about “Super Intelligence”
- 15 U.S.C. 9401: Definitions (National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act)
- International Trade Administration: National SI Center and American SI Exports Program
- HuffPost: Trump Claims He’ll Soon Officially Ban The Term ‘Artificial Intelligence’
- The Hill: Trump seeks to rename artificial intelligence as ‘super intelligence’ in UN speech
- KATV: Trump gets mocked for saying those who say ‘artificial intelligence’ are enemies
- Khaleej Times: Musk renames SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI after Trump’s ‘super intelligence’ push
- Wikipedia: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
About this article: GeekBlog covers U.S. technology news, AI, phones, smartwatches and gaming. Every story is written and checked under our Editorial Policy. Spotted a mistake or have a story tip? Contact our editors.
