US agencies must now call AI "Super Intelligence"

The US executive branch has a new official name for AI, set by executive order.

What the order requires

On September 29, 2026, President Trump signed an order titled “Inaugurating The Era Of Super Intelligence.” According to the White House fact sheet, it directs all federal departments and agencies to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in official correspondence, public communications, policy documents and non-statutory documents, and to no longer use “Artificial Intelligence” or “AI.”

The president’s science adviser is told to propose a federal definition of the new term. The White House argues that the old name implies “simply imitating or automating human intelligence.”

The name has a short history. Trump’s September 19 poll offered Superior, Extreme and Supreme Intelligence; a later poll pitted Super Intelligence against Superior Intelligence, CNBC reports, and the order uses Super Intelligence.

A separate accord, and what stays the same

The same day, six tech leaders, among them Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, Dario Amodei and Mark Zuckerberg, signed a separate two-page “White House Accord on Super Intelligence” on voluntary safety controls. CNBC reports that this document renames nothing.

The order changes words inside the executive branch, not laws. Statutes, along with previously issued regulations, contracts and grants, are outside its scope. For now, the same technology will carry two official names in Washington: “AI” in the law and “SI” in agency communications.

For now, the practical effect falls on wording, not on how the technology is regulated. The voluntary accord signed the same day is the document that touches safety practice, and it relies on the signers’ own commitments rather than on any new rule. Anyone reading federal material on the subject will now meet both terms, depending on when and where a document was written.