Trump Orders Federal Offices to Use 'Super Intelligence' Instead of 'AI'
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on September 29, 2026, requiring U.S. executive-branch policy websites, policy documents and press releases to use 'Super Intelligence' instead of 'artificial intelligence'. The Verge The order is titled "Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence." The White House The White House lists 'Inaugurating The Era Of Super Intelligence' as an Executive Order dated September 29, 2026.
The directive tells executive departments and agencies to use "Super Intelligence" and "SI" in official correspondence and public communications, "to the maximum extent permitted by law." The White House It does not require changes to past regulations or documents. Officials are expected not to acknowledge the terms 'artificial intelligence' or 'AI' in relevant settings. Trump first described the rebrand in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly, then signed after a White House luncheon with tech CEOs and officials to discuss Super Intelligence. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk joined Trump in public remarks after the meeting.
Trump had said he would sign an order renaming artificial intelligence to 'super intelligence'. CNN Top AI executives signed a commitment to 'self-police' AI development after meeting with Trump, and Trump rejected new AI laws after they agreed to that approach. SMH Separately, the administration launched an America.gov AI website intended to make government services more accessible.
In practical terms, federal language feeds into procurement requirements, compliance filings, grant solicitations, standards references and contractor documentation. The swap does not change model architectures (how models are built), training pipelines (how they learn from data), evaluation harnesses (how they are tested) or deployment controls (how they are released and monitored). It changes the cover-page wording. Teams tracking federal guidance will need translation layers between terms. Search matters. Version control matters. Audit trails matter.
In my view, the friction will be practical, not theoretical. Engineers already map internal names to outside regulatory terms, and this adds one more map. The expectation not to acknowledge 'artificial intelligence' or 'AI' leaves ambiguity for communications staff and vendors that must quote federal text exactly while keeping their own technical papers, contracts and safety reports consistent. That work is unglamorous and takes time.
The broader context here is the parallel commitment to 'self-police' development and the decision not to pursue new laws. Voluntary commitments can move faster than rulemaking and can use direct knowledge from labs running large-scale training and inference, the computing used to build models and run them for users. They lack the enforcement, reporting duties and court review that come with statute. Watching my two children grow up with the PC, web and smartphones taught me that adoption rarely waits for vocabulary to settle. People learn the tool in front of them.
Looking ahead, the optimistic case centers on use. If the America.gov AI effort makes services easier to use, that is a real gain, and consistent federal branding could focus attention and funding. The concern is confusion if one label covers both rules-based automation, software following fixed rules, and frontier foundation models, large general systems built for many tasks. Precision helps builders. For now, builders should treat SI as the required term for federal material, keep AI as the working term elsewhere, and document the match clearly.
