President Donald Trump has a new name for artificial intelligence: “super intelligence.” And on Sunday, one of the industry’s biggest players finally agreed to use it.
Elon Musk posted on X that he will rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, following Trump’s push to replace the term “artificial intelligence.” Asked by a user about the renaming, Musk replied: “Yes, we will make that change,” Reuters reported. As of Sunday, the SpaceXAI X account had not yet changed, and Musk gave no timeline.
Everyone else is still dodging. The Washington Examiner asked six AI companies (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, SpaceXAI, and Nvidia) whether they plan to rename their companies or products, or otherwise adopt Trump’s preferred terminology. Musk aside, none would disclose an answer.
Trump’s order landed on Sept. 29.
What the Trump super intelligence order does — and doesn’t — do
It directs the federal government to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “super intelligence” and “SI” across official communications. The order covers agency websites, official correspondence, reports, and policy documents, and the executive branch “will not acknowledge the usage” of the old terms in those settings, according to reporting on the order.
ChatGPT doesn’t become an “SI chatbot.” Google doesn’t have to rename Gemini. As TechRepublic noted, the order applies to how the executive branch talks and writes about AI, not to how OpenAI or Anthropic run their businesses.
There is one potentially bigger piece: the administration also wants a formal federal definition of “super intelligence,” due around late November. That definition would decide which commercial systems fall under future federal oversight frameworks. The naming fight may be theater; the definition is the thing to watch.
The corporate dodge: five companies, zero commitments
The six companies the Examiner asked are the same ones that stood beside Trump at the White House this week to sign a voluntary “Accord on Super Intelligence.” When it came to the rebrand, the choreography broke down for all of them except Musk.
Musk had already been warming to the term. He used it at the White House on Tuesday: “I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of AI — pardon me, super intelligence.” Then on Sunday he went all the way, announcing SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI. Reuters noted he gave no timeline, and the company’s X account hadn’t changed as of publication.
Mark Zuckerberg tried to thread the needle. He posted on X this week: “We believe superintelligence will create significant new opportunities for all people and businesses.” A Meta spokesperson wouldn’t clarify for the Examiner whether he meant today’s AI or the hypothetical future kind. That distinction matters: Zuckerberg created Meta Superintelligence Labs last year to work on systems that don’t exist yet.
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang played it straight, posting after the White House meeting: “Super Intelligence offers an extraordinary opportunity to advance discovery, productivity, security, health, and prosperity.”
Sam Altman simply kept saying “AI,” and his company still has it in its name. Google’s Sundar Pichai worded his post-meeting statement to avoid the word entirely, referencing the accord without naming the technology.
One company in, five mum. Nobody will explain the hesitation.
Why the industry won’t touch the rebrand
The hesitation has a simple explanation, and the Examiner found it: “superintelligence” already means something in tech. For decades, researchers have used it to describe hypothetical systems that outthink humans. A milestone nobody claims to have reached.
Slapping that label on today’s chatbots and coding agents does more than confuse people. It quietly redefines the present as the future. If everything from a customer-service bot to a frontier model is “super intelligence,” then nothing is.
Trump’s framing appears aimed at winning the narrative, not the taxonomy. The Examiner reported that he first floated the rebrand amid calls led by Anthropic’s Dario Amodei for a coordinated slowdown in frontier AI development (a public relations campaign for the technology, in other words). Speaking to reporters outside the West Wing on Tuesday, Trump put it bluntly: “Remember this: whoever wins SI, because now we’re calling it again super, we’re using the word super because the other word is a fake word. It’s not a good, it’s not an appropriate word. Whoever wins SI is going to win.”
It’s a striking contrast with the mood inside the labs. Just last month, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned that AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade,” and the Examiner noted the White House push is unfolding against that far darker debate over where the technology is headed.
Why this matters
On its surface this is a story about a name. But it’s really a story about who gets to define what the technology is, and how scared you should be of it.
Washington’s new framing casts AI as a prize in a great-power race, something America wins rather than something America fears. That serves an administration that prefers industry self-policing over new rules: hard to justify strict regulation of something called “super intelligence” when the same White House has dismissed doomsday talk as overblown.
The companies, meanwhile, have their own incentives to keep their distance. For labs pitching enterprise clients, the word “superintelligence” implies godlike systems, not the buggy agents that are currently hacking Hugging Face through leaky sandboxes. And for labs with doomers on staff and “existential risk” language in their IPO filings, the term cuts the other way — it lends credence to the very warnings they’ve spent months trying to manage.
So six CEOs smiled at the White House, signed a voluntary accord, and went home. One of them, Musk, actually adopted the name on Sunday. The rest won’t even give the Examiner a one-line answer. That’s the real story here: on safety, they’re willing to sign a paper; on vocabulary, five of six won’t say a word. The old name stays artificial. For now, anyway.
Frequently asked questions
What did Trump’s executive order actually change about the name “AI”?
The Sept. 29 order tells federal agencies to use “super intelligence” and “SI” in official correspondence, websites, reports, and policy documents instead of “artificial intelligence” and “AI.” It doesn’t change federal statutes, doesn’t rewrite old documents, and doesn’t require any private company to change anything.
Will OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic adopt the “super intelligence” name?
Musk is the exception. He announced on Oct. 4 that he will rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, telling an X user: “Yes, we will make that change.” But the other five (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Nvidia) all declined to tell the Washington Examiner whether they plan to rename companies or products or adopt the term.
Why is the tech industry hesitating on the “super intelligence” rebrand?
Because the word already has a fixed meaning in tech: hypothetical AI systems that surpass human capabilities. Using it for today’s models would blur the line between existing technology and systems that haven’t been built yet, and nobody wants to be the first to confuse customers or investors.
Is the rename connected to the White House Accord on Super Intelligence?
They arrived the same week but are separate. The accord is a voluntary industry commitment to internal safety controls, signed by the leaders of Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Nvidia. The rename is a federal-comms directive from an executive order.
Sources: Washington Examiner, Reuters.