# Trump Clearly Expects AI Leaders to Go Along With His ‘Super Intelligence’ Rebrand. Will They? > Source: > Published: 2026-09-30 02:30:38+00:00 The President wants certain things to happen, and the entire world sometimes watches as those things fail to happen on the grandest scale possible. He wants the U.S. to annex Greenland. He wants the Strait of Hormuz to open. Now he quite clearly wants everyone to call artificial intelligence “Super Intelligence,” which, in keeping with his writing style from the golden age of his Twitter account, should be written in title case. With [an executive order signed on Tuesday,](https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/09/inaugurating-the-era-of-super-intelligence/) Trump has made it official policy across the executive branch of the U.S. government to use “Super Intelligence” in place of “artificial intelligence” when communicating with the public, and in executive branch reports and policy documents. Furthermore, the executive branch “will not acknowledge the usage of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI’ in any applicable setting,” the order states rather brusquely. And there can be little doubt that Trump runs the executive branch and has the constitutional power to order his underlings to change their official usage of terms. Enthusiastic about it or not, they’ll want to comply, because it’s clearly not something Trump takes lightly. He said he was going to launch this rebrand [a little over a week ago in a U.N. speech](https://gizmodo.com/trump-says-hes-changing-artificial-intelligence-to-super-intelligence-on-government-documents-2000815518), and he already [ordered diplomats to start using it](https://apnews.com/article/trump-super-intelligence-rebrand-ai-diplomats-02123c7bf18c692a12b2b3e3b9ce30c5). He also [claims he convinced Chinese President Xi Jinping](https://gizmodo.com/trump-gets-xi-to-agree-to-call-ai-super-intelligence-white-house-says-2000817802)—who doesn’t publicly speak English—to use the term. But when it comes to the actual captains of industry for whom “artificial intelligence” is a term of art, this might be trickier. Trump has no constitutional power over how they speak, and what terms companies use—or, in the case of OpenAI, put in their names. But make no mistake, Trump does want the leaders of U.S. AI-centric companies to use his new favorite term. On Tuesday, the same day as the Super Intelligence rebrand executive order, he [met with AI business leaders](https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-host-zuckerberg-anthropics-amodei-other-ai-titans-tuesday-2026-09-29/) including (deep breath) Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Nvidia President and CEO Jensen Huang, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, and, of course, Elon Musk. Those leaders apparently signed some sort of document promising to adhere to a set of safety standards. The document is not legally binding, but Mr. *Art of the Deal* [called it](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/29/tech-white-house-ai-lunch-trump.html) “morally binding,” whatever that means. At any rate, at a photo op with Amodei, Huang, Pichai, Zuckerberg, Brockman, and Musk after the Tuesday meeting, Trump heard a stray question shouted by an unknown reporter about AI safety—a question that contained the term “AI.” He didn’t answer it, but [he did launch into this revealing rant](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/29/tech-white-house-ai-lunch-trump.html): *“It’s not AI. It’s SI. That’s the other thing. We’ve changed the name officially today. We’ve changed the name, Steve, officially, to SI. Okay? ‘SI’ [pronouncing it “sigh”] like ‘S-I’ instead of ‘A-I.’ You know what that means? Super intelligence. So the name, I guess, that’s [turns to Jensen Huang, who nods] really quite an announcement, because. But the name has been officially changed by the biggest, the smartest, the greatest people anywhere in the world at this. And I was with President Xi a few days ago, and he would admit, these are the smartest people in the world at what they do, and it’s a big thing. But it’s been officially changed to Super Intelligence or SI.”* Trump’s nod to Jensen Huang, and his claim that “the name has been officially changed by the biggest, the smartest, the greatest people anywhere in the world at this” leave little room for interpretation. During that meeting, Trump evidently got these business leaders to agree to use his term, or at least thinks he did. The question is, are they really going to make the switch, or are they going to ignore the president’s preference? In a statement to Gizmodo in response to a question about whether Meta plans to use the term “Super Intelligence,” Meta sounded like it was making some sort of attempt at splitting the baby. Public Affairs Manager Francis Brennan wrote “Mark has been using ‘superintelligence’ publicly for some time, as seen in his ‘[The Future is for Everyone’](https://www.meta.com/thefutureisforeveryone/?srsltid=AU7gw4W2v000iIgeHx0oMh2rYlGKoyI2FIP_8RPTGx5VKGVmWxHVcmEE) letter, our [product descriptions](https://www.meta.com/blog/meta-connect-2026-everything-we-announced/), and the name of Meta Superintelligence Labs.” It should be noted that the subheading of Zuckerberg’s “The Future is for Everyone” letter is “*The Path to a Positive AI Future,”* and it contains the term “AI” 44 times. The text of Trump’s executive order leaves no room for such baby-splitting. “Superintelligence,” is a real word, [in use since 1822](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/super%20intelligence), to refer to intelligence greater than humanity’s. It seems to have originally meant something closer to “God’s plan” rather than “software that can write entire B2B SaaS applications better and faster than a human”—which seems to be how Silicon Valley uses it. In other words, AI executives use it to refer to *a subcategory of AI*. Last year, in his essay “[The Gentle Singularity](https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity),” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote “Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence,” at a point in time when his company had already been creating and marketing “AI”-based products for years. Superintelligence as it’s commonly understood, is clearly not what trump means with his two-word term “Super Intelligence.” His Tuesday executive order says as much. Super Intelligence refers to “the technologies and systems encompassed by the term ‘artificial intelligence’ as defined in section 9401(3) of title 15, United States Code.” Here’s that definition, [according to the Cornell online law library](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/9401): *“The term ‘artificial intelligence’ means a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations or decisions influencing real or virtual environments. Artificial intelligence systems use machine and human-based inputs to— (A) perceive real and virtual environments; (B) abstract such perceptions into models through analysis in an automated manner; and (C) use model inference to formulate options for information or action.”* It certainly doesn’t say it has to exceed human intelligence. The order does add that the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (APST), which is currently Michael Kratsios, has 60 days to figure out a proposal for legislation establishing a legal definition of Super Intelligence. Such a definition could “modify, expand upon, or otherwise supersede” the terms artificial intelligence and AI. And who knows, maybe there’s a universe where Kratsios comes back to Trump in two months and says “After careful deliberation, this term is already in use, but not the way you’re using it, so maybe we should confine it to just certain ceremonial cases,” and then Trump nods in a sagely fashion and follows the recommendation of his wise vizier. Anything’s possible. But while the rebrand is fresh in Trump’s mind, if he expects AI CEOs and other leaders to actually roll out this change, and presumably start getting Americans more broadly to go around saying Super Intelligence too, he might be setting the stage for some fresh conflict with the people he calls “the smartest, the greatest people anywhere in the world at this.” In addition to Meta, Gizmodo sought statements from Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, Nvidia, and Google about their use of the term “Super Intelligence.” We did not receive replies in time for publication.