Trump signs order renaming federal 'AI' to 'Super Intelligence'

President Trump signed an executive order on September 29 directing every federal department and agency to drop 'artificial intelligence' from its official vocabulary and use 'Super Intelligence,' or 'SI,' in its place. The order applies to correspondence, public communications, websites, reports and policy documents; previously issued regulations, contracts and historical documents are exempted.

The order also gives the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology 60 days to submit proposed legislative language establishing a federal definition of Super Intelligence, and to assess whether that definition should modify or expand existing statutory AI definitions. Until then, SI is defined by reference to section 9401(3) of title 15, United States Code.

Trump signed the order the same day he hosted nearly two dozen Silicon Valley leaders for a 'Super Intelligence Luncheon' at the White House. Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang were seated on either side of the president; Google's Sundar Pichai, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Palantir's Alex Karp and Jeff Bezos were among the guests, CNN reported. Speaker Mike Johnson attended as well.

At the lunch, Trump and Johnson unveiled a voluntary industry pledge, the White House Accord on Superintelligence, which the president called 'almost like a constitution' and 'morally binding,' The Hill reported. Trump added that 'there's going to be a tremendous self-policing aspect.' The pact's stated scope is a 'Joint Commitment on Frontier SI Responsibilities' rather than enforceable rules.

Trump's own justification for the rename turned on one word. 'When you say artificial intelligence, it's artificial,' he said, per CNBC. 'This isn't; this is extreme intelligence.' He called 'super' 'the best word of all, and it's the simplest.'