US 'Super Intelligence' rebrand draws patchy compliance from agencies and tech giants

A single-directive order

At the end of September, President Trump signed an executive order containing just one instruction: federal agencies must stop calling artificial intelligence "artificial intelligence" and start calling it "Super Intelligence," according to MIT Technology Review. The term reportedly beat out "Extreme Intelligence" and "Supreme Intelligence," options the president floated in a poll on X shortly before signing.

The order's stated rationale is that modern systems extend human ingenuity rather than merely simulate intelligence, so official language should reflect that. But MIT Technology Review argues the change fits a broader pattern of administration renamings — the Gulf of America, the Department of War — that have historically spilled past government walls and turned vocabulary into a loyalty test. The Associated Press, the outlet notes, was barred from some White House press events after declining to adopt "Gulf of America."

Uneven uptake across agencies

One month in, compliance is patchy. "Super Intelligence," often shortened to "SI," now appears in government solicitations, including an Immigration and Customs Enforcement request for companies to build "SI-powered" surveillance for detention facilities. Most agency websites have quietly made the swap, and the National Institutes of Health now displays a banner warning visitors they may encounter both terms during the transition.

Slips continue, though. The Pentagon unveiled a new warfare-research initiative called Project Meridian the day after the order, using the old vocabulary. A Federal Trade Commission release used the one-word "superintelligence" rather than the required two-word capitalized form, and Health and Human Services releases show no trace of the new language. Because the order exempts previously issued regulations and documents, entities such as the Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office keep their original names. Even Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said "AI" in an October 3 interview.

Tech executives are hedging

The day the order was signed, the White House also released a nonbinding AI safety statement, the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, signed by six of tech's most powerful figures: Sundar Pichai of Google, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Elon Musk of xAI, and Jensen Huang of Nvidia.

Their vocabulary has not uniformly followed. A CNBC analysis of third-quarter earnings calls, cited by MIT Technology Review, found only Zuckerberg and Musk consistently using the term — and Zuckerberg hardly counts, since Meta had already adopted "superintelligence" last year. Musk pledged to rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, and his companies lean on the term most, yet he still mixes SI and AI when posting on X. Executives at Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet said "AI" on their calls, though Microsoft's recent letter to shareholders referenced the "Super Intelligence era," and Huang alternates between both. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, for his part, has renamed the company's AIForce offering to SIForce.

Pressure is building

On October 27, the president criticized the Wall Street Journal on Truth Social for not using "Super Intelligence," claiming nearly everyone else uses the term or soon will, and suggested a new rule could go further than the executive order by banning "artificial intelligence" from government documents outright, MIT Technology Review reports. Even Newsmax, an outlet whose founder has described it as supportive of the president, has not adopted the term.

The rebrand also carries administrative costs. Government employees are drafting guidance on how departments should navigate the change, and agency leaders face an end-of-November deadline to produce a legislative definition of "Super Intelligence" to submit to the president.

Why it matters

Two-thirds of Americans say they interact with AI multiple times a week, and the technology has moved to the center of the national conversation: Americans rate it as more important to them in this election than environmental and climate policy, with Democrats ranking it above abortion and gun policy. Unlike immigration or climate, opinions on AI do not yet split neatly along partisan lines, which is part of what makes broad public debate about the technology possible. MIT Technology Review's core concern is that if terminology becomes a shibboleth, that debate fractures just as it is getting started — people who might have argued productively about chatbots, jobs or warfare will instead be sorting each other politically by which word they choose.