You can't say "artificial intelligence" in a federal memo anymore. The word the government wants instead is "super intelligence," and the man who signed that into policy says people who refuse to switch are the enemy.
On September 29, President Trump signed Executive Order 14434, titled "Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence." It tells every executive department and agency to stop using the terms "artificial intelligence" and "AI" in official communications, websites, reports and policy documents, and use "Super Intelligence" and "SI" instead. Existing regulations, contracts and archival records are left alone, according to a Wiley legal alert on the order, but going forward, the government's own paperwork gets the new name.
Trump's stated reason is blunt: he thinks the word "artificial" makes the technology sound fake. He said as much around the signing, framing the old term as an insult to a technology he wants Americans to see as a historic leap rather than a gimmick. A week later, on October 4, he went further and stood up a new body to run the policy behind the name. He called it the Super Intelligence Force.
The SIF isn't a slogan. It has a chair, Jay Clayton, and three vice chairs: FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael, and Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor. Trump described its job at the October 4 announcement as coordinating "the effort of the Federal Government to ensure that America continues to lead the World in Super Intelligence," comparing its stakes to the Industrial Revolution and the internet.
That task force grew directly out of the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, a joint pledge signed the same week as the executive order. The signatories read like a who's who of frontier AI: Nvidia's Jensen Huang, Google's Sundar Pichai, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, xAI's Elon Musk, Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI Group president Greg Brockman all put their names on it. Microsoft sat it out. The accord asks companies to run internal safety controls around cybersecurity, biosecurity and chemical-weapons risks, bring in outside auditors, and report to independent board committees. None of it is legally binding. There's no penalty for walking away from it, and no regulator enforcing it.
Elon Musk confirms SpaceXAI will be renamed SpaceXSI after Trump order Musk's confirmation comes after Trump's September 29 order told agencies to replace "AI" with "Super Intelligence," and days after his new Super Intelligence Force task force named Jay Clayton to lead it. - elon musk spacex ai renamed super intelligence - trump executive order ai rebranding federal agencies
So the rebrand landed on an industry already bracing for a correction. Investors have spent much of 2026 asking whether AI spending has outrun what the technology actually returns, and workers have watched AI get blamed for layoffs across tech and beyond. Renaming the thing doesn't change either problem, and critics were quick to say the real audience for "super intelligence" is public opinion, not computer science.
That criticism got sharper once Trump raised the stakes on language itself. In comments that followed the SIF rollout, he suggested that people who keep saying "artificial intelligence" instead of the new term are acting against the administration's interests, phrasing that multiple outlets reported as calling holdouts the enemy. Former Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene responded on X with a middle finger emoji. Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie wrote that "artificial intelligence is a term historically reserved for politicians," needling Trump by turning his own complaint about the word "artificial" back on him.
Here's the thing: you can order a federal website to swap one noun for another. You cannot order ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude to stop calling themselves AI models, and none of the signatories to the September accord has announced plans to change their own branding. Nvidia still sells AI chips. Anthropic still calls Claude an AI assistant. The word that's actually disappearing is confined to government memos, not the industry the government is trying to rename.
Industry leaders have been telling reporters privately that they doubt the new term sticks, and nothing in the weeks since the SIF launch has moved that opinion. Congress still has to work through a separate process the executive order kicked off: agencies have until November 28 to send proposed legislative language defining "Super Intelligence" for use in statute, since an executive order alone can't rewrite laws that already use "artificial intelligence." That deadline, not the mockery on social media, is the next real test of whether this rebrand survives contact with the law.
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