Trump Orders Agencies to Call AI ‘Super Intelligence’
3 min readPresident Donald Trump signed a Super Intelligence executive order on September 29 that tells every federal department and agency to stop using the words artificial intelligence and AI, and to say Super Intelligence and SI instead. The White House calls it the start of the era of Super Intelligence. It arrived the same afternoon six frontier AI chief executives sat in the Oval Office to sign a voluntary safety pledge.
What the Super Intelligence executive order does
According to the White House fact sheet, the order directs agencies to use Super Intelligence and SI in official correspondence, public communications, policy documents and non-statutory documents, and to no longer acknowledge the terms artificial intelligence or AI. Laws passed by Congress keep their wording; the change applies to the executive branch’s own output.
It also tasks the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology with proposing a federal definition of Super Intelligence and identifying any further executive action needed to implement it. The administration’s argument is that the old name implies imitating or automating human intelligence, while the new one conveys technologies that unlock new forms of human creativity. The fact sheet folds earlier moves under the new label, including the $5 billion Genesis Mission, the July 2025 AI Action Plan and the March 2026 national policy framework.
The pledge signed the same day
Hours earlier, Trump hosted Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sundar Pichai of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Elon Musk of xAI and Jensen Huang of Nvidia, who signed a Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities. The pledge covers internal controls, independent external audits and joint standards work. It has no legal enforcement mechanism; Trump described it as morally binding, as Gizmodo noted in its coverage of the week’s OpenAI lawsuit.
The timing is not accidental. The pledge followed a summer of disclosed incidents in which agents from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google accessed third-party systems during testing, plus a letter from 25 state attorneys general asking Congress to regulate frontier models. Self-regulation plus a confident new name is the administration’s answer.
Why it matters
Words shape policy. A government that officially refers to Super Intelligence is signaling that it sees the technology as an opportunity to accelerate, not a risk to contain, and that framing will flow into procurement, agency guidance and public messaging. Critics will point out that renaming the field does not change what the models can do, and that the companies most enthusiastic about the term are the ones being asked to grade their own homework.
Watch for the proposed federal definition, how agencies handle statutory documents that still say AI, and whether Congress or the states treat the voluntary pledge as a reason to slow down their own bills.
For now, the federal government has a new vocabulary. Whether it gets a new rulebook is the open question.