Will OpenAI change its name to “OpenSI”? Probably not, but it’s a question worth asking given the increasingly chummy relationship between the AI company and President Donald Trump.
On September 29, the president signed an executive order officially renaming AI “SI,” or “superintelligence,” and ordered that government agencies comply with the change in their official communications. The administration is already enforcing the change, with reports this week that the Justice Department instructed employees to use the new language in official documents.
The order doesn’t require private companies to adopt the new terminology, but Elon Musk, whose relationship with Trump has recently warmed, quickly announced plans to rename his company SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI.
Fast Company asked OpenAI, which also has “AI” in its name, whether it plans to rebrand as “OpenSI,” but the company didn’t immediately respond Friday. The Washington Examiner asked the same question, and got no response. However, Sam Altman said on a Politico podcast that his company has “no plans” for a name change. “But we do like we have been talking about super intelligence a lot and we will continue to talk about it,” Altman added.
Trump told reporters that the “artificial intelligence” or “AI” name isn’t right for the technology, “because it’s not artificial.” He’d earlier said at the UN General Assembly that the change is needed because “artificial” makes it “sound fake.”
Really, it’s all about image rehabilitation. Amid a wave of negative backlash to new data centers and to the privacy risks of frontier AI models, the White House is hoping a name change can help improve the tech’s public image.
The problem is that “superintelligence” already has its own meaning in the tech industry, broadly understood to mean AI that’s far more capable than humans at practically everything. Nevertheless, Trump seems determined to apply the name to the considerably less capable AI systems of today. He said on Truth Social that anyone who doesn’t use the new name is “the enemy.”
OpenAI, however, has hardly been an enemy of the Trump administration. Altman has cultivated close ties to the president, donating $1 million to his 2025 inauguration fund, publicly praising him, and regularly attending White House events.
And while Altman wasn’t at the White House the day the “SI” executive order was signed, OpenAI president Greg Brockman attended a private lunch with other tech and AI leaders that day. Brockman also signed the White House’s “Accord on Super Intelligence” on OpenAI’s behalf.
Last year, Brockman and his wife, Anna, gave $25 million to the Trump-aligned political action committee MAGA Inc., placing them among the group’s largest donors.