Trump Administration Renames Artificial Intelligence as ‘Super Intelligence’
President Trump signed an executive order on September 30 telling every federal agency to stop saying “Artificial Intelligence.” From now on, the official term is “Super Intelligence,” or SI for short. He says artificial sounds fake. Honestly, most people reading the order for the first time assume it’s satire. It isn’t.
The order is titled “Inaugurating The Era Of Super Intelligence.” And it lands less than 24 hours after Trump sat down with the biggest names in AI at the White House.
What the order actually does
Federal departments and agencies now have to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in official communications going forward. Old regulations, contracts, and documents stay untouched, nobody is rewriting the backlog.
The order goes further than just a word swap though. It says the executive branch will no longer “acknowledge the usage of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI’ in any applicable setting.”
There’s a real policy piece buried in here too. Trump’s science and technology advisor, Michael Kratsios, has 60 days to figure out whether “Super Intelligence” should replace the actual legal, statutory definition of artificial intelligence. That’s the part worth watching. A press release renaming something is one thing. Rewriting federal law is another.
Where this idea came from
This didn’t appear out of nowhere. Trump ran a poll on Truth Social earlier in September, asking followers to pick between “Superior Intelligence,” “Super Intelligence,” and “Extreme Intelligence.” Around 66,000 people voted.
A follow-up poll pitted Super against Superior. Super won with 65 percent.
He then took the idea to the United Nations General Assembly, telling the room that “artificial” makes the technology sound fake and that the world should switch to “super” instead. The executive order is him following through on that.
The accord signed the day before
A few hours before the order, Trump met with a room full of AI industry leaders. Reports name OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk from xAI and SpaceX, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang among those present.
They signed what the White House called a morally binding accord, a one-page document asking the companies to put four layers of internal controls and audits in place. Not legally enforceable. Just a handshake agreement, in writing.
Jensen Huang leaned into the new branding almost immediately. At the America.gov launch event, he said something close to: we used to call them data centers, but what we’re building now are really SI factories. Musk reshared the White House clip and wrote two words: Super Intelligence.
Not everyone’s on board
Senator Mark Warner, the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, didn’t hold back. He’s been pushing AI security legislation for a while now, and his statement cut right to it.
His point, paraphrased: the companies building these systems are the ones warning that safety is falling behind capability, and the administration’s answer is a new name plus a request for the industry to police itself. Changing the label doesn’t touch the actual risk.
That’s the tension sitting underneath this whole story. One side is treating the rename as a branding win. The other is asking why a name change is the headline instead of the safety gap everyone keeps bringing up.
If terms like superintelligence and AGI still feel blurry to you, our guide to what AGI actually means breaks down the real technical definition, separate from whatever a government memo decides to call it this month. And if the safety concerns Warner is pointing at interest you more than the rebrand itself, we’ve covered the broader AI safety and security testing gap in more depth.
What happens next
Nothing changes for the public right away. Companies aren’t required to rename their products, and nobody’s forcing “AI” out of everyday language.
What actually matters is that 60-day clock. If Kratsios recommends folding “Super Intelligence” into federal law, this stops being a branding exercise and starts being a real legal shift in how the government defines the technology it regulates.
For now, it’s federal paperwork wearing a new name, while the companies that build the thing keep building it exactly the same way they were building it last week.
