President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday directing every department and agency of the executive branch to replace the words “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI”.
According to the White House fact sheet, the substitution applies to official correspondence, public communications, policy documents and other non-statutory documents, and agencies are told to no longer acknowledge the older terms in those contexts. Statutory documents are outside the order, which is the only thing that could have been otherwise: an executive order cannot rewrite the words Congress used.
There is no definition yet
The order also instructs the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology to propose a federal definition of “Super Intelligence” and “SI”, and to identify any further executive action needed to implement it. Nextgov reported that the order asks for legislative language defining the term within 60 days.
That sequencing is the notable part. Agencies are being told to use a term across their public output before the government has agreed what the term means. In the technical literature, superintelligence denotes a system that exceeds human capability across essentially all domains — something no deployed system is claimed to be. The order applies the label to the whole field.
The stated rationale is that the new wording better reflects what the systems do. The fact sheet argues that these systems unlock new forms of human creativity rather than imitating human intelligence, which is what the older label implies.
No deadlines, no enforcement
The fact sheet names only one official — the science adviser — and sets out no compliance deadline, no enforcement mechanism and no penalty for an agency that keeps writing “AI”. In practice, federal documents will change terminology at the speed of whoever is editing them, and the order’s reach stops at the boundary of anything Congress has written.
It also creates a translation problem the order does not address. Federal AI policy is already dense with statutory and regulatory references — the AI in Government Act, agency AI use-case inventories, procurement language, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework — all of which say “artificial intelligence” because the documents that created them do.
What to watch
The order was signed on a day when the same administration also launched a federal chatbot and hosted the industry to sign a voluntary self-policing accord, and it is the least consequential of the three. The thing to watch is the proposed federal definition. If the science adviser produces one and Congress is asked to adopt it, a rebranding becomes a legal category, and legal categories determine what gets regulated.
