On September 29, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order titled "Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence," officially replacing "Artificial Intelligence" and "AI" with "Super Intelligence" and "SI" across the executive branch. Federal agencies now have to use the new terms in official correspondence, public communications, websites, and policy documents — and, per the order's own wording, the executive branch "will not acknowledge the usage of 'Artificial Intelligence' and 'AI' in any applicable setting." Not deprecated. Not discouraged. Not acknowledged. Somewhere, a federal web developer is doing a horrified grep -ri "artificial intelligence" . across every .gov domain right now.
How We Got Here: Democracy, But Make It a Word Choice
Trump teased the rename earlier that day at a website launch, explaining the linguistics with the rigour you'd expect: "When you say artificial intelligence, it's artificial. But the word super is the best word of all and it's the simplest, so we're going to be naming it SI."
Peak branding logic. "Artificial" lost points for being artificial. Groundbreaking.
And in case you were wondering whether this went through any kind of rigorous policy process — it did not, it went through an X poll. Trump pitted "Superior Intelligence" against "Super Intelligence" to the internet, and Super Intelligence won with 65% of the vote. A multi-trillion-dollar technology category now has its official U.S. government name because it beat a focus-tested synonym in a Twitter poll. Somewhere, a brand strategist who spent six weeks on a naming deck is quietly updating their résumé.
What Actually Changes (Spoiler: Almost Nothing, Technically)
- Federal agencies: mandatory rename, effective now, in non-statutory docs and websites.
- Private companies: not required to change anything. ChatGPT does not legally become an "SI chatbot." Google does not have to rename Gemini. The order politely asks the entire private sector to go along with the vibe and then has zero jurisdiction to make them.
- The Assistant to the President for Science and Technology has 60 days to propose an actual legal definition of "Super Intelligence" — meaning the government renamed the thing before deciding what the new name officially means. Ship first, define later. Very agile.
Coinciding with the signing, executives from Google, Meta, OpenAI, and others showed up at the White House and signed a "morally binding" voluntary safety accord — "morally binding" being the diplomatic phrase for "not legally binding at all," which at least one senator pointed out has, and I quote, no teeth. So: a new name for the technology, and a pinky promise about the technology, on the same afternoon. Efficient.
The Part That's Genuinely Funny If You Work in Infrastructure
Per The Register, someone on X immediately connected the dots on .si — Slovenia's country-code top-level domain — speculating that anyone trying to curry favour with the new terminology might start scooping up .si domains for their rebrand. Nothing says "we take AI safety seriously" quite like your compliance team accidentally buying real estate in Slovenia's DNS zone because the acronym lined up.
And the critics' point, buried under all the branding theatre, is the one actually worth keeping: renaming the risk doesn't change the risk. Calling it "Super Intelligence" instead of "Artificial Intelligence" doesn't make alignment easier, doesn't make a model hallucinate less, and doesn't make the voluntary, toothless safety accord signed the same day any more enforceable. If anything, swapping "artificial" — a word that at least signals "not the real thing" — for "super," a word whose entire job is to sound more powerful and less controllable, is a strange flex for an administration simultaneously trying to reassure everyone this is all under control.
So: update your .gov scraper's regex, leave your actual import ai statements exactly where they were, and enjoy the brief, glorious window where "SI" means something other than "International System of Units" to absolutely nobody in engineering yet.
