US government ordered to replace 'AI' with 'Super Intelligence' in official language

Federal language gets a mandated rewrite

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order requiring the US government to stop referring to "artificial intelligence" in official communications and to use "Super Intelligence" instead. According to The Verge, the directive applies to policy websites, policy documents and press releases going forward, while existing regulations and previously issued documents do not have to be revised.

Trump announced the change at an event marking the launch of America.gov on Tuesday. As The Verge reports, he described "super" as the best and simplest word available, and said Chinese President Xi Jinping — who visited the White House the previous week — approves of it as well. His objection to "artificial," he explained, is that it implies the technology is somehow counterfeit, a comparison he tied to his familiar "fake news" refrain. He had previewed the rebrand in a speech to the UN General Assembly the week before, presenting it in part as a way to soothe public anxiety about the pace and safety of AI development.

A narrow term stretched wide

In industry parlance, superintelligence denotes hypothetical systems that outperform humans at essentially everything — not the machine-learning software in use today. The Verge notes that the administration is taking that narrow, loaded term and using it as a wholesale substitute for the much broader statutory definition of artificial intelligence, and that officials will be expected to avoid acknowledging the terms "artificial intelligence" or "AI" in relevant settings.

The result is a linguistic mismatch: laws and regulations on the books define and constrain artificial intelligence, while the government's own messaging will describe the same technology with a word that usually signals something far more powerful and far more speculative.

Self-regulation and data centers

The order was signed after a White House luncheon with technology executives and government officials. Speaking briefly afterward, flanked by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Trump characterized the gathering as productive and cordial, according to The Verge. On oversight, he indicated that industry should largely police itself, arguing that the Justice Department, the FBI and other existing bodies already provide regulation.

Addressing local resistance to the massive data centers that AI services require, Trump said companies would supply affected communities with resources and economic support, and predicted that data centers would eventually be viewed favorably.

Why it matters

Wording in government documents is not merely cosmetic. Federal AI policy — from procurement standards to safety commitments — is anchored to a statutory definition of artificial intelligence, and an executive branch that declines to use that term while the underlying law still does creates a gap between official language and legal text. That gap could complicate how agencies communicate about, and potentially interpret, the rules governing the technology.

The order also signals the administration's broader posture: an emphasis on industry self-regulation and rapid data center construction over new safety measures, with a rebrand chosen for its rhetorical punch rather than its technical accuracy.