Here’s who is falling in line for Trump’s “Super Intelligence” loyalty test

At the end of September, President Trump signed an executive order containing a single directive: government agencies must stop calling artificial intelligence “artificial intelligence” and use “Super Intelligence” instead. The term won out over other contenders — “Extreme Intelligence” and “Supreme Intelligence” — that Trump had floated weeks earlier in a poll on X.

The administration’s stated rationale is that today’s systems “amplify human ingenuity” rather than merely “imitate” intelligence, so official terminology should reflect that. But the move follows a familiar pattern of White House rebrands, from the Gulf of America to the Department of War to the Kennedy Center renaming fight, and observers expect it to function the same way: as a loyalty test. The administration barred the Associated Press from some White House press events after the outlet declined to adopt “Gulf of America.” AI is a far higher-stakes term to police — a technology two-thirds of Americans report interacting with multiple times each week.

A month in, adoption is uneven. “Super Intelligence,” or “SI,” is appearing in procurement documents, including a new Immigration and Customs Enforcement request for companies to build “SI-powered” surveillance for detention facilities, and most government sites have quietly swapped the language. The National Institutes of Health now displays a banner warning visitors that both old and new terms may appear during the transition. There have been visible stumbles: the Pentagon’s Project Meridian, announced a day after the order, used the old terminology; an FTC press release used lowercase “superintelligence” rather than the capitalized two-word form the president ordered; and recent HHS releases show no new language at all. Because the order exempts previously issued regulations and documents, established names like the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office are likely to persist, and “AI” may prove hard to dislodge.

Inside government, the habit change is slower still. A national-lab researcher interviewed weeks after the order repeatedly said “AI” before catching himself, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used “AI” in an October 3 interview.

What to watch: Trump’s October 27 Truth Social post criticized the Wall Street Journal for not using “Super Intelligence,” calling it the name “virtually everyone else is using, or soon will be,” and suggested a forthcoming rule could go beyond the executive order to ban “artificial intelligence” outright from government documents. The open questions are whether such a rule materializes, whether agencies outside the federal government face pressure to follow, and whether vendors and contractors will treat the terminology as a compliance requirement or a rhetorical preference.

Key facts from the source include the end-of-September executive order, the ICE “SI-powered” solicitation, the FTC and Pentagon inconsistencies, Hegseth’s October 3 usage, and Trump’s October 27 post suggesting a possible ban on “artificial intelligence” in government documents.