Trump Orders Federal Agencies to Drop 'AI' and Say 'Super Intelligence' Instead

President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to stop using the term "artificial intelligence" in official communications and adopt "Super Intelligence" instead. The change covers policy websites, policy documents and press releases issued by executive branch agencies, according to the order. It amounts to a government-wide rewrite of how Washington names the technology it regulates, funds and deploys.

Trump framed the shift as a matter of plain language. "The word super is the best word of all, and it's the simplest," he said. The order does not appear to change any underlying program, budget line or technical standard — only the label attached to them in public-facing material. Agencies will now have to update existing pages and templates, a process that touches everything from research grant descriptions to procurement notices.

The move lands amid a broader push by the administration to speed AI development and reduce what it calls regulatory friction. Naming is not neutral in that fight: the words agencies use shape how statutes, contracts and international agreements are interpreted. If federal documents say "Super Intelligence," vendors, universities and foreign partners working with US programs will face pressure to mirror the terminology or risk mismatched paperwork.

It also creates a practical collision with the private sector. Companies, standards bodies and academic journals built their vocabularies around "artificial intelligence," a term coined in the 1950s and embedded in everything from ISO standards to export-control lists. Federal staff writing about those frameworks will have to decide when to translate and when to quote, and lawyers will argue over whether the rename alters the scope of any rule that references the old phrase.

The order drew immediate skepticism from researchers who note that "Super Intelligence" already carries a specific meaning in the field — a hypothetical system exceeding human capability across the board, not the machine-learning tools agencies actually buy and oversee. Using it as a catch-all could blur distinctions that matter for safety testing and procurement. Others read the change as branding aimed at domestic politics rather than policy substance.

What happens next depends on implementation. Watch whether agencies issue formal guidance on retrofitting archived documents, whether Congress writes the new term into pending legislation, and whether contractors treat it as mandatory or cosmetic. The open question is whether a rename with no stated technical criteria changes anything beyond the letterhead.