Trump's "Super Intelligence" rebrand: who is using the new term

At the end of September, President Trump signed an executive order with a single directive. It told government agencies to rebrand what they had called artificial intelligence as "Super Intelligence". The term won out over "Extreme Intelligence" and "Supreme Intelligence", which the president had offered in a poll on X a couple of weeks earlier.

The stated reason is that today's AI systems amplify human ingenuity rather than merely imitate intelligence, and the government's wording should reflect that. The order says it does not apply to previously issued regulations or documents.

The term now shows up more often on government solicitations. One example is a new request by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for companies to build "SI-powered" surveillance for ICE detention facilities.

On most government websites the new wording has been swapped in silently. Some sites, including that of the National Institutes of Health, now carry a banner warning visitors they may see both the new and the old terms during the transition period.

The rollout has had hiccups. A day after the rebrand order, the Pentagon announced an initiative to study the future of warfare, called Project Meridian, and used the old terminology.

A Federal Trade Commission press release last week used "superintelligence" instead of the two-word, capitalised version the president ordered. Recent press releases from Health and Human Services show no sign of the new language.

For government employees, "SI" is taking time to replace "AI". A researcher at a national lab interviewed a few weeks ago used "AI" repeatedly before acknowledging the slip-up.

Even Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used "AI" in an interview on October 3. The term "AI" will likely stick around, given the many AI-related offices and programmes created in recent years, such as the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office at the Pentagon.

On October 27, Trump took a break from midterm endorsements on Truth Social to criticise the Wall Street Journal for not using "Super Intelligence". He called it "the name which virtually everyone else is using, or soon will be".

He suggested a new rule will soon go further than the executive order and outright ban "artificial intelligence" from government documents. According to MIT Technology Review · AI, the rebrand works as a loyalty test: those who use the new term show allegiance, those who don't become targets.