Trump signs order rebranding AI as "Super Intelligence"

Trump signed an executive order on September 29 after a White House luncheon with tech CEOs including Jensen Huang and Elon Musk: official government websites, policy documents and press releases must use “Super Intelligence” instead of “AI” or “artificial intelligence,” and officials are expected to drop the old terms — though existing regulations need no rewrite. The same event announced a voluntary “Superintelligence Joint Commitment,” described by coverage as a “morally binding” industry self-policing pledge with no legal force; Trump quipped that “artificial” is “like the news. Fake news,” and that “the word super is the best word of all.”

The facts

• The order: naming only — websites, policy documents and press releases switch to Super Intelligence; past regulations stay as written.
• The accord: a voluntary joint commitment per The Information’s briefing; The Guardian and The Hill describe it as a vague, morally binding deal, and the signatory list is unverified.
• The framing: Trump said the change quells safety fears and claimed Xi Jinping “loves it”; the rebrand was previewed in last week’s UN General Assembly speech.
• The chatbot: America.gov’s new Q&A bot answers Minecraft questions with an ~1,800-word existential monologue — an official easter egg rewriting the game’s End Poem, not a glitch.
• Sourcing note: accord details come from a paywalled briefing plus secondhand coverage; the signatory list remains unconfirmed.

Our take

The renaming is symbol politics: it turns a regulatory fight into a branding exercise, and the “accord” downgrades enforcement from statute to declaration — the mirror image of Florida asking a court to halt frontier development and Khanna’s recursion bill. The practical effect for builders is a two-track vocabulary: when your customer is the US government, “Super Intelligence” is now the official term. The backdrop is Amodei’s White House dinner — on wording, the White House chose the labs’ version.