Here’s who is falling in line for Trump’s “Super Intelligence” loyalty test
2026-11-09 · MIT Technology Review
At the end of September, President Trump signed an executive order with a single directive: federal agencies should rebrand what they had been calling artificial intelligence as “Super Intelligence.” The term had beaten “Extreme Intelligence” and “Supreme Intelligence” in a poll Trump ran on X a couple of weeks earlier. The article places the move in the White House’s recent habit of renaming things—from the Gulf of America and Lake America to the Department of War and the continuing fight over the Kennedy Center. The stated rationale is that today’s AI systems “amplify human ingenuity” rather than merely “imitate” intelligence, so government terminology should reflect that. But the article argues the effects will extend beyond government, turning word choice into a political loyalty test: using the new term signals allegiance, while not using it can invite attacks. It notes that the Associated Press was barred from some White House press events after it did not adopt “Gulf of America.” Because AI is central to the national conversation and two-thirds of Americans say they interact with it multiple times a week, this may be the boldest rebrand yet.
Inside government
A month in, “Super Intelligence” or “SI” appears more often in government solicitations, such as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement request for companies to build “SI-powered” surveillance for ICE detention facilities. Most government websites have quietly swapped terms. Some, including the National Institutes of Health, now carry banners warning visitors that both the new and old terms may appear during the transition. But there have been hiccups. A day after the order, the Pentagon announced Project Meridian, an initiative to study the future of warfare, using the old terminology. A Federal Trade Commission press release used “superintelligence” instead of the two-word, capitalized version ordered by the president, and recent Health and Human Services press releases show no sign of the new language. “AI” will likely stick around because of countless AI-related offices, initiatives, and programs, such as the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office; the executive order says it does not apply to previously issued regulations or documents. Government employees are also taking time to adjust: one national-lab researcher interviewed used “AI” repeatedly before acknowledging the slip-up, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used “AI” in an October 3 interview.
A loyalty test beyond government
Trump’s other rebrands suggest the goal is not merely to change government vocabulary but to change how everyone else speaks. On October 27, Trump criticized the Wall Street Journal for not using “Super Intelligence,” “the name which virtually everyone else is using, or soon will be,” and suggested a new rule would go beyond the executive order to ban “artificial intelligence” from government documents. But the Journal is not alone: Newsmax, whose founder described it as “supportive of the President and his policies,” also is not using the president’s preferred term.
Big Tech’s mixed response
The same day Trump signed the rebranding order, he released a nonbinding statement on AI safety, the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, signed by six powerful tech figures: Sundar Pichai of Google, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Elon Musk of xAI, and Jensen Huang of Nvidia. Three of them attended Trump’s inauguration. Yet the term has not caught on. CNBC’s analysis of third-quarter earnings calls found that only Zuckerberg and Musk used it consistently. Zuckerberg does not quite count because Meta has said “superintelligence” since last year anyway. Musk’s companies use it most—he pledged to rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI—but Musk himself mixes SI and AI on X. Executives from Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet used “AI” on their calls, though Microsoft’s recent shareholder letter referred to the “Super Intelligence era.” Huang has referenced the term but still uses AI too.
Cost and the real concern
One objection is that the rebrand will cost time and taxpayer dollars. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff can decide that SIForce is a better name than AIForce and direct his company to implement it, but government employees are now spending time writing guides on how departments should navigate the rebrand. Under the executive order, leaders of federal agencies must draft a new legislative definition of “Super Intelligence” to be run by the president by the end of this month. The author says he is more worried about what this does to the national conversation about AI than about the potential waste of time.