The White House Wants to Retire the Word 'AI'

The Trump administration is pressing an unusual piece of language policy. Inside the federal government, the phrase "artificial intelligence" is being pushed out, and "super intelligence," or SI, is meant to take its place.

The latest nudge came this week, when the president used a post on Truth Social to ask why The Wall Street Journal had not adopted the new term and said the government would stop using "AI" and "artificial intelligence" in its own documents. The post built on an executive order signed on September 29 that directs federal departments and agencies to use "super intelligence" in their non-statutory materials, including correspondence, public communications, websites and reports.

The order is narrower than the rhetoric around it. By its own terms it leaves existing regulations, contracts, grants and historical documents alone, and it applies only as far as the law allows. It imposes no penalty on private citizens, researchers, journalists or companies who carry on saying "AI," according to reporting from Sinclair's Washington outlets. A White House science adviser has 60 days to propose language defining "super intelligence" in statute, which is where a slogan would begin to harden into a legal term.

The reasoning Trump has offered is that "artificial" makes the technology sound weaker than it is. On the same day he signed the order, roughly two dozen technology chief executives gathered at the White House for the unveiling of a voluntary "Accord on Superintelligence," which the president described as "morally binding." What that phrase commits anyone to is unclear, since the pact carries no force of law.

Renaming a field is easier than governing it, and the substance of American AI policy remains contested. Anthropic recently went as far as to draft its own safety bill for Congress to weigh, and New York's incoming mayor has accused Washington of walking away from oversight altogether. Against that backdrop, a fight over whether to say AI or SI can look like a distraction. It also sets the vocabulary that official rules will one day be written in, and words chosen now tend to stick.