Executive order tells federal agencies to say 'Super Intelligence' instead of 'AI'

An executive order dated 29 September 2026 directs the executive branch to use the terms Super Intelligence and SI instead of Artificial Intelligence and AI, and states that it will not acknowledge the old terms in any applicable setting. The instruction applies to the maximum extent permitted by law. Section 2 extends the substitution to official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents and other non-statutory documents. The Guardian reported that the renaming order was signed the same day, alongside other announcements on the technology made at the White House.

The order has limits. It does not require changes to previously issued regulations, presidential actions, contracts, grants or other historical documents, so older material keeps its existing wording. It also ties the new terms to an existing legal definition: for the purposes of the order, Super Intelligence and SI mean the technologies already covered by artificial intelligence in section 9401(3) of title 15 of the United States Code, unless a later presidential action or an Act of Congress supersedes that. Within 60 days, the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology must propose legislative language for a federal definition and recommend any further executive action.

The main point of caution is one of meaning. In federal documents, Super Intelligence now refers to the same technologies that artificial intelligence did under existing law; the order's own definition does not describe a new or more capable class of system, and readers should not take the change of name as a statement about capability. What is not yet known is what the 60-day proposal will contain, whether Congress will take up any new statutory definition, and how agencies will handle documents that sit between the new usage and the older wording the order leaves untouched.