The Pulse
Trump Orders Federal Agencies to Call AI ‘Super Intelligence’
Trump signed an executive order telling federal agencies to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” instead of “artificial intelligence” and “AI.” The legal definition is unchanged for now; a proposed federal definition is due within 60 days.
AI.info Team · Written with AI ·
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday directing federal departments and agencies to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in place of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI.” The order, titled “Inaugurating The Era Of Super Intelligence,” says the technologies now being built “far exceed what was envisioned when the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ first came into use.” It puts into writing the rename Trump announced a week earlier from the podium of the United Nations General Assembly.
Agency paperwork changes, old documents stay
Section 2 of the order lists where the new terms apply: official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents and other non-statutory documents within the executive branch, all “to the maximum extent permitted by law.” Section 1 gives the reasoning and states the policy:
“The terminology used by the Federal Government should reflect the transformative capabilities of these technologies and the limitless opportunities they create for the American people. Accordingly, the term ‘Super Intelligence’ more appropriately captures the promise, potential, and rapidly advancing capabilities of these technologies. It is therefore the policy of my Administration that, to the maximum extent permitted by law, the executive branch shall use the terms ‘Super Intelligence’ and ‘SI’ in place of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI’ and will not acknowledge the usage of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI’ in any applicable setting.”
Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, executive order “Inaugurating The Era Of Super Intelligence”
Nothing in the order requires agencies to alter previously issued regulations, presidential actions, contracts, grants or other historical documents. The White House fact sheet released the same day follows that rule: it refers to the July 2025 plan by its published title, America’s AI Action Plan, and describes the plan’s goal as winning “the SI race.”
A new name with the old legal definition
For now, “Super Intelligence” means exactly what “artificial intelligence” already means in federal law. Section 3 ties the new term to the definition in section 9401(3) of title 15 of the U.S. Code, which describes “a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations or decisions influencing real or virtual environments.” That definition governs until it is superseded by a later presidential action or by an Act of Congress.
The order gives the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology 60 days, until November 28, to send the president proposed legislative language for a federal definition of “Super Intelligence” and “SI.” The proposal must assess whether the new definition should modify, expand on or supersede the statutory definition of artificial intelligence, suggest conforming amendments to existing laws that refer to AI, and recommend any further executive action. Changing the statutes themselves would be up to Congress.
What the order does not reach
The order binds only the executive branch. Laws passed by Congress keep their wording, and nothing in the text applies to companies or how they describe their products.
Other governments are not bound either. At the U.N. on September 22, Trump said U.S. documents, “hopefully the world’s,” would switch to the new term. A White House fact sheet on Xi Jinping’s state visit says the two leaders agreed to use “super intelligence” rather than “artificial intelligence.” The fact sheet also announces a U.S.-China Super Intelligence (SI) Dialogue and a channel for “SI incidents”; China’s foreign ministry, listing the same agreements, calls them the China-U.S. AI Dialogue and a channel for “AI incidents.”
From a U.N. speech to an executive order
In the speech, Trump said the word “artificial” makes intelligence sound fake. “It’s actually amazing, but we have to be careful,” he told the assembly, before adding: “Let’s see if I have any power.” The day before, he had asked his Truth Social followers to choose between “super intelligence” and “superior intelligence”; Newsweek reported that more than 50,000 people answered and 65 percent picked the first. After the speech, Newsweek reported, a State Department email urged federal employees to use SI in documents.
Trump signed the order after a White House lunch with technology executives, six of whom signed a voluntary “White House Accord on Super Intelligence,” a set of safety commitments that includes internal controls and independent external audits. Trump said on Tuesday that “the name has been officially changed by the biggest, the smartest, the greatest people anywhere in the world.” According to Computerworld, the accord uses the new term in its title, while its commitments refer to “frontier models.”
A term researchers already use for something else
In the field, superintelligence names a technology that does not yet exist. The philosopher Nick Bostrom defined it in 2014 as “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest.” Breaking Defense observed after the U.N. speech that experts have long used “super intelligence” or “artificial super intelligence” for an AI smarter than the smartest human. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman wrote in a 2025 essay that “humanity is close to building digital superintelligence.”
The order instead attaches the word to the systems the statute already covers. Before the order was signed, Jean-Pierre Dubé, a University of Chicago marketing professor, told Newsweek that confusion with the established meaning made quick adoption unlikely unless tech leaders took up the term.
Poll figures and reaction
The order arrived on the day Quinnipiac University published a national poll in which 25 percent of registered voters approved of Trump’s handling of artificial intelligence and 58 percent disapproved, with 17 percent offering no opinion. The survey of 1,032 registered voters was taken September 24 to 27, before the order, with a margin of error of 3.8 points; 71 percent said they were more likely to back a candidate who supports stricter guardrails for AI development, 16 percent one who supports expanding it. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia answered the order with a statement:
“The companies building the most powerful AI systems are warning us that the technology is advancing faster than our safeguards. The president’s response? To rename it and tell the companies developing it to regulate themselves. But changing what we call artificial intelligence does nothing to address the very real risks that come with increasingly powerful AI systems.”
Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), Vice Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
The proposed federal definition is due at the White House by November 28. The next exchange of what the White House calls the U.S.-China Super Intelligence (SI) Dialogue is set to take place by November as well.