US government ordered to say SI, not AI

Per a roundup published October 3 by Mydrivers, President Trump announced at the UN General Assembly on September 29 — and signed an executive order the same day — requiring every US government department and public agency to replace “artificial intelligence (AI)” with “super intelligence (SI)” across official documents, websites, public reports and all other formal communications. His stated reasoning: the “artificial” prefix makes the technology sound less than hardcore, and SI “sounds stronger and is more accurate than the original term.” The order was signed after a closed-door meeting with dozens of senior executives from leading US tech companies, whom he called “the core people building America’s golden age of technology.”

The first receipt: a domain gold rush

The fastest reaction came from the domain market, ahead of any tech company. Klara Herman, a spokesperson for Slovenia’s registry, confirmed to press that 44,000 .si domains were registered in September, versus fewer than 2,000 in August — a surge of more than 2,100% month over month, and an extreme outlier against the trailing twelve-month average. SI happens to be Slovenia’s country-code top-level domain, and registrants are betting the new acronym will carry brand and traffic value. TechCrunch and TechRadar both covered the rush; TechRadar estimated that interest in some super-intelligence-related names rose more than a hundredfold.

Wired’s read: a loyalty test that worked

Wired places the renaming in a political frame rather than a linguistic one: convening tech executives and asking them to endorse the change was a public alignment exercise — a loyalty test — and it worked. No executive at the meeting publicly objected, and the executive order converts that posture into a federal documentation standard. From now on, US government AI regulation, procurement and appropriations language will carry SI framing, and every contractor and compliance team that writes against federal text has a new glossary to adopt.

From rhetoric to compliance work

The renaming itself costs almost nothing, but it travels down the administrative chain with real friction: definition clauses in procurement documents, scope language in regulatory reports, and consistency between state and federal texts all have to be rewritten under the new acronym. That work lands at the same moment the labs are already surrounded by regulators — every legal document now carries an extra layer of translation. The order’s coverage clause names “all official documents, website content, public reports and other formal external communications,” but specifies no transition period and says nothing about retroactivity for existing filings. Increment-only replacement is a manageable cost; retroactive replacement of archived material would be a different order of magnitude.

Contractors face a sharper version of the same question. Federal procurement has always written technical specifications in the old vocabulary, and it is genuinely unclear whether a bid that still says “AI” survives compliance review. For everyone outside the US government’s orbit, the episode is a signal of how far the politicization of AI has traveled: from policy files into language itself. European and Asian regulators are unlikely to follow the renaming, but “what to call this technology” now carries a political dimension, and terminology alignment in global technical communication has turned from a standards question into a diplomatic one.

What to watch

A state writing an industry’s vocabulary into an executive order is rare, and the market’s 21-fold reaction says investors believe it is more than rhetoric. Two things are worth tracking. First, how many federal documents actually complete the switch — a verifiable indicator of enforcement seriousness. Second, whether SI sinks in the way “cloud computing” did, from order to industry language, or stalls as a piece of paperwork. The domain speculators have already placed their bets; the registry’s next monthly numbers will show whether they were early or simply wrong.