Nadella, Huang and Benioff adopt White House 'super intelligence' rebrand of AI

The White House wants AI renamed

President Donald Trump has set out to rebrand artificial intelligence as "super intelligence," and according to The Verge, some of Silicon Valley's most powerful figures are complying. The pressure behind the change has been unusually direct: Trump declared that the White House regards anyone who keeps using "Artificial Intelligence" rather than what he called the newer and more accurate "Super Intelligence" as an enemy. As The Verge reports, an executive order requiring government agencies to adopt the new term was announced at an AI summit.

Executives fall in line

Elon Musk moved fastest. The Verge reports that he promised to rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI. Within hours of Trump's declaration, Marc Benioff said Salesforce would rename AIForce to SIForce, which The Verge characterizes as a swift capitulation, though not entirely out of character.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attended the summit where the executive order was announced and has publicly aligned himself with Trump, including arguing that the danger posed by AI is overblown. When Nvidia subsequently announced a $1 billion commitment to scientific advancement, it specified that the money would support "super intelligence research." As The Verge points out, Huang has a great deal to lose if he ends up on the administration's bad side.

Microsoft's Satya Nadella is the most recent to adopt the phrasing. In a post calling for an "emergency brake" on the technology, Nadella referred to it repeatedly as "super intelligence." He attended the same summit as Huang, alongside Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, Dario Amodei and Musk.

A broader pattern of accommodation

The Verge situates these moves within a larger shift in the tech industry's posture. During Trump's second term, Silicon Valley has repeatedly sought to win favor with the administration, a reversal from the far more contentious relationship of the first term. Notably, the rebrand has not traveled much beyond the industry itself: most of the general population, The Verge notes, still says AI.

Why it matters

A vocabulary change can look cosmetic, but here language is functioning as a loyalty test, set from the top and backed by an executive order for federal agencies. When companies that depend heavily on favorable federal treatment adopt the preferred wording within hours, terminology stops being a neutral technical choice and becomes a signal of political alignment. The shift also opens a gap between official and corporate usage on one side and everyday usage on the other, and it repurposes a word that researchers have long reserved for hypothetical systems far beyond today's models. If the new phrase spreads into procurement documents, regulation and marketing, telling apart ordinary AI work from genuinely far-reaching claims about the technology could become harder, not easier.