Trump signs order replacing 'AI' with 'Super Intelligence'

Donald Trump signed an executive order on September 29, 2026 titled 'Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence,' directing federal agencies to use 'Super Intelligence' and 'SI' in place of 'artificial intelligence' and to 'not acknowledge' the older term. Writing for Tech Policy Press, Justin Hendrix traces a campaign that began informally in July 2025, when Trump complained, 'I don't like anything that's artificial... It's genius. It's pure genius.'

The rebrand went public at the UN General Assembly on September 22, 2026, where Trump said the change would apply to 'all United States documents and hopefully the world's.' State Department diplomats received instructions the next day.

It took an aviation emergency to surface how literal the enforcement is. During the nationwide ground stop on November 13, 2026, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin paused mid-briefing to correct a reporter: 'We call it SI around here, remember.' Harvard political scientist Ryan Enos told Tech Policy Press the exchange was telling: 'Prioritizing regime-approved rhetoric during an emergency is a sign of authoritarianism.'

Industry has largely complied. Elon Musk announced SpaceX's AI unit would become SpaceXSI; Mark Zuckerberg deployed the term during Meta earnings calls; Nvidia's Jensen Huang defended Trump's rationale in media interviews. Jenna Ruddock of Free Press read the pattern as transactional, driven by 'lucrative government contracts and the promise of regulatory fast-tracks,' and said that if the shift matters at all, 'it shows cracks in the tenuous, transactional alliance between the AI industry and Trump.'

Emily Tucker of Georgetown Law's Privacy Center argued the stakes are rhetorical, not cosmetic. 'Renaming AI as Super Intelligence is more like renaming the Department of War than Lake America,' she said, suggesting the move aims to 'preempt certain kinds of arguments or make it harder for people to use the categories with which they are used to resisting abuses of power.' Dave Karpf of George Washington University read it less generously, calling Trump 'out of his depth' on AI: 'All he's really saying there is, I have nothing to add to these great world historic debates, so you have to use the words that I want to use.'

Trump's own framing at the UN was flatter: 'Whoever wins Super Intelligence wins... We're leading now over China and everyone else.'