Donald Trump with Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang and Elon Musk at the White House, September 29, 2026. Official White House photograph by Daniel Torok.
Donald Trump may have just pulled off one of the biggest rebranding exercises of his political career. With the stroke of a pen, he has attempted to rename an entire industry. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is out. Super Intelligence, or SI, is in.
And remarkably, some of Silicon Valley's most powerful figures are going along with it.
Elon Musk promised to rename SpaceXAI as SpaceXSI. Salesforce's Marc Benioff announced that AIForce would become SIForce. Nvidia's Jensen Huang has embraced the terminology, while Microsoft's Satya Nadella has begun using it in public discussions of the technology. Not everyone is making the switch, but some of the industry's biggest names appear happy to oblige.
A scientific field with a 70-year history is being given a new identity. You have to marvel at Trump's instinct for branding, whatever you think of his politics.
This is the man who transformed political opponents into easily remembered caricatures: Low Energy Jeb, Crooked Hillary, Sleepy Joe. He didn't invent the expression fake news, but he helped turn it into a ubiquitous weapon of political combat, now used across the ideological spectrum.
Now he's applying that same instinct to one of the most consequential technologies ever developed.
His reasoning is wonderfully simple. Artificial sounds like fake. And the intelligence being created by computers, Trump argues, is anything but fake. In fact, it's becoming so powerful that we should call it super.
On September 29, he made it official, signing an executive order directing federal agencies to replace AI with SI in their official communications and non-statutory documents wherever legally permitted. The order does not require private companies to change their terminology. But as a branding move, it is hard to ignore.
There's just one problem.
Superintelligence already means something. And it isn't quite what Donald Trump says it is.
A new name for an old ambition
The idea of machines possessing intelligence superior to our own has captivated scientists, philosophers and science-fiction writers for decades.
In 1998, philosopher Nick Bostrom described superintelligence as an intellect substantially smarter than the best human minds in practically every field, from scientific discovery and creativity to general wisdom and social skills.
That's considerably more ambitious than describing the capabilities of today's ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.
Yes, these systems can already outperform people at particular tasks. They can write computer code, solve complex problems, analyze enormous collections of information and produce remarkably sophisticated prose. Yet they can also make elementary errors, invent facts and display surprising gaps in reasoning.
There's a difference between being extraordinarily capable at certain tasks and possessing intelligence superior to humanity's finest minds across practically everything.
In the field's own vocabulary, today's chatbots and coding assistants are AI: large language models, increasingly working as agents. Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is the still-unmet goal of broadly human-level ability. Artificial superintelligence, or ASI, is the step beyond that: a mind that outstrips the best of ours. Trump's SI is an attempt to find a popular term for it all.
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The problem with calling everything super
The distinction between artificial intelligence and super intelligence isn't simply a matter of scientific terminology. AI describes a broad field of technology. Super intelligence describes a particular level of capability that researchers have yet to demonstrate.
They aren't interchangeable.
Nor does artificial necessarily mean fake. An artificial heart isn't a fake heart. Artificial light illuminates a room just as effectively as sunlight. Artificial intelligence describes intelligence created through engineering rather than biology.
There's a delicious irony buried in Trump's executive order. Having established Super Intelligence as the federal government's preferred terminology, it initially defines the new term using the existing legal definition of artificial intelligence. It then gives the president's science adviser 60 days to propose a different federal definition.
In other words, Trump has renamed the technology before deciding precisely what the new name means.
Perhaps that's perfectly reasonable in the world of marketing, where creating a compelling identity can be as important as explaining the product underneath it. And Silicon Valley certainly understands marketing.
Artificial intelligence has acquired considerable public baggage. People worry about disappearing jobs, deepfakes, surveillance, enormous energy consumption and the possibility of machines becoming too powerful for humans to control.
Super intelligence offers a different emotional proposition. It suggests power, progress and possibility. It also aligns technology executives with the preferred vocabulary of an administration that exercises considerable influence over their regulatory environment. Whether a particular executive's motivation is scientific, commercial or political is harder to establish.
But will the public buy it?
In a September 28 YouGov survey of 21,449 American adults, 53 per cent preferred the name artificial intelligence, while just 9 per cent favoured super intelligence. The remainder had no preference or were unsure.
The executives, it seems, are adopting the language faster than their customers.
Will the rest of the world follow?
The international implications are equally interesting. Canada's national strategy is called AI for All, while Europe has constructed an extensive legal and regulatory framework around its Artificial Intelligence Act.
Neither seems likely to abandon its vocabulary simply because Washington has decided to do so. We could end up with an unusual linguistic divide: America's executive branch talking about SI while much of the international scientific and business community continues using AI.
And there's a further complication. The people actually building these systems need increasingly specific terms to distinguish one capability from another. Artificial general intelligence, artificial superintelligence and recursive self-improvement describe different ambitions, not synonyms for the same machine.
Lumping them together under SI risks confusing what machines can do today with what their developers hope they might accomplish tomorrow. Oh, it’s SI is also the old .com for Sport Illustrated (which has faced its own AI issues).
The power of two letters
None of this necessarily means Trump's rebranding will fail. Language evolves. Words acquire new meanings. And there is a legitimate argument that the systems now emerging are so much more powerful than earlier generations of software that they deserve a new description.
But there's a danger in attaching the label superintelligence to everything from a customer-service chatbot to a system capable of discovering new medicines.
It risks confusing aspiration with achievement.
And it may obscure the questions that matter most: How intelligent are these machines becoming? Who controls them? How will they change our working lives? And how do we ensure that their extraordinary capabilities expand human possibility rather than diminish it?
Perhaps we're entering the age of super intelligence. Perhaps Trump's terminology will eventually replace artificial intelligence in everyday conversation. Stranger things have happened. And Trump, who has demonstrated an uncanny ability to make words stick, might once again confound the experts.
But there's one distinction worth preserving, whatever we decide to call the technology.
A president with a savant-like skill at branding can change what we call a machine with the stroke of his pen. He cannot change how intelligent it actually is.