On Amazon’s earnings call Thursday, CEO Andy Jassy said “AI” well over a dozen times in his introductory remarks alone. In Microsoft’s annual report, filed last week, the phrase “super intelligence” appears eight times, starting at the top of the shareholder letter. These two documents describe the same industry in the same week, and the difference between them is a vocabulary preference expressed, as CNBC reported, by President Donald Trump on Sept. 29 — and enforced, so far, only where CEOs choose to enforce it.
The mechanism is straightforward. At a White House luncheon for tech leaders a month ago, Trump ordered that “super intelligence” replace “artificial intelligence” inside executive branch departments and agencies. This week he announced on Truth Social that he is banning the terms “AI” and “artificial intelligence” in “all relevant documents” and “everything else.” An executive order binds agencies, not public companies. But earnings calls are read in Washington, and the calls show a clear split.
Who changed, and who didn’t
Elon Musk complied on both his companies’ calls last week, after renaming SpaceX’s AI division SpaceXSI earlier in October. On Tesla’s call, discussing humanoid robots, he said: “Some of them look very impressive, but they’re not really using any kind of advanced AI or SI.” Mark Zuckerberg used the term on Meta’s Oct. 21 call, emphasizing the company’s “goal of delivering personal superintelligence to everyone.” His compliance, though, is partly retroactive: Meta created a unit called Meta Superintelligence Labs last year, so the word was already in the org chart before it was in any executive order.
The holdouts are not quiet about it. Beyond Jassy’s dozen-plus mentions, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told investors on Wednesday that one of the company’s three points of focus is “designing AI to empower people.” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai was seconds into his quarterly commentary when he said the search giant’s “AI investments are driving increased usage and overall user growth.”
Between the poles sit the hedge cases. Microsoft’s Nadella said “AI” on the call while his own annual report opened with the new vocabulary: “For Microsoft, the central question as we enter this Super Intelligence era is not just how big the opportunity becomes, but how we deliver the real-world outcomes that every country, community, and company demands and deserves.” IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, who did not attend the September lunch, used both: innovation in “hybrid infrastructure and super intelligence,” and IBM as a “software-led hybrid cloud and AI platform company.” Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said Thursday that the industry’s chip supply shortage has been “driven by the unprecedented demand for super intelligence.”
Others moved before they had to. Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora repeatedly said “SI” on CNBC and posted on X on Sept. 30 that “the meeting at the WH on SI was an epic moment.” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang — whom CNBC describes as Trump’s top tech ally on the AI safety debate — praised the “White House Accord on Super Intelligence” on X, writing that “Super Intelligence offers an extraordinary opportunity to advance discovery, productivity, security, health, and prosperity.”
What a rename costs
Changing a word costs a company nothing, which is precisely why it functions as a loyalty signal. Leaders of all the major tech firms have already contributed to Trump’s inauguration or his planned White House ballroom, and several have dismantled the DEI programs the president opposes; those were expensive or structural. Vocabulary is free, and the split on this week’s calls maps onto proximity to the administration rather than onto any technical distinction — “SI” and “AI” here denote the same products, the same capital expenditures, the same chips.
The timing is also not incidental. The rebrand lands days before next week’s midterm elections, with Republicans at risk of losing both chambers and Trump’s economic approval rating at an all-time low in the latest CNBC All-America Economic Survey. What to watch next is not the calls but the filings: Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta report to the SEC in prose that lawyers review, and Microsoft’s annual report has already shown which version of the word survives legal review. The November earnings calls from the remaining majors will show whether the holdouts’ “AI” count was a position or a habit.