--- title: "Trump Declares ‘Artificial Intelligence’ a Banned Term, Its Users ‘THE ENEMY’" description: "An executive order rebrands AI as ‘Super Intelligence’ across the federal government; private companies get to choose how much they value peace" author: "Nate Ledger" published: 2026-10-08T17:43:04Z modified: 2026-10-08T21:02:49Z url: https://rews.cc/a/trump-declares-artificial-intelligence-a-banned-term-its-use-622e5a language: en tags: ["trump", "ai", "openai", "musk", "speech", "us", "tech"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Trump Declares ‘Artificial Intelligence’ a Banned Term, Its Users ‘THE ENEMY’ *An executive order rebrands AI as ‘Super Intelligence’ across the federal government; private companies get to choose how much they value peace* By Nate Ledger · October 8, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/trump-declares-artificial-intelligence-a-banned-term-its-use-622e5a ## In brief - Trump posted that anyone using “artificial intelligence” instead of “Super Intelligence” is “THE ENEMY” of the White House - An executive order directs federal agencies to use “SI” in official communications “to the maximum extent permitted by law” - The order does not apply to private companies; enforcing it against them could raise First Amendment issues - Elon Musk said SpaceX would rename its SpaceXAI unit to SpaceXSI; its X account still said SpaceXAI on Thursday - OpenAI’s Sam Altman said there are no plans to rename the company, though it will keep talking about super intelligence Here is a question in linguistics, and also in constitutional law: if the president of the United States decides that a widely used English term is wrong and announces a better one, what happens to everyone who keeps using the old one? [As Business Insider’s Brent D. Griffiths reports](https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-super-intelligence-rebrand-enemy-white-house-2026-10), the answer, as of Thursday, is that they become enemies of the White House. “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!” President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social. The reasoning, previously articulated, is that “artificial” suggests the technology is fake. Which, one could note, is also what “super” suggests about several things it has been attached to historically, but the point of a rebrand is not to survive scrutiny. > “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!” Now, the mechanics here matter, because “THE ENEMY” is doing rhetorical work that the actual legal instrument cannot. After meeting with industry leaders at the White House in late September, Trump signed an executive order directing federal departments and agencies, “to the maximum extent permitted by law,” to use “‘Super Intelligence’ and ‘SI’ in place of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI’” in official correspondence, public communications and websites. That phrase — “to the maximum extent permitted by law” — is the load-bearing wall of every executive order. It means the order governs the government’s own speech, which the government is allowed to govern. What the government is on much shakier ground doing is punishing private citizens or companies for their word choices; punishing disfavored speech is, as Griffiths notes, a potential textbook First Amendment violation. The order does not apply to private companies like OpenAI, because the White House has no legal authority to make it apply. So the structure of the thing is: a binding rule for federal agencies, and for everyone else a vibes-based enforcement regime in which the president calls you the enemy and you decide how much that is worth to you. And here the story becomes a study in corporate decision-making under ambiguity, because companies now face a genuine optimization problem. On one side: the cost of renaming things, which is real but small — some new letterhead, a domain, a sign on a building. On the other side: the goodwill of a White House that hands out AI policy, export licenses and government contracts. Elon Musk, whose companies consume all three, did the math quickly. The SpaceX CEO wrote on X that the company would rename its AI unit, SpaceXAI, to SpaceXSI. As of Thursday afternoon, the unit’s X account still said “SpaceXAI,” which is either a lag in execution or a small masterpiece of having it both ways. Musk’s unit is an unusually elegia ccase study in the low cost of compliance, incidentally, because it has already been renamed once this year. SpaceX announced in February that it was acquiring xAI, the maker of the Grok chatbot, and rebranded it SpaceXAI in July. Changing the last two letters is, for this organization, practically a routine filing. Other companies are being asked to pay more. OpenAI is called OpenAI; the disfavored term is in the name, the one on the door and the stock documentation. OpenAI President Greg Brockman, at a White House panel with Trump standing feet away, said the company “builds artificial intelligence” to help everyone — the old term, out loud, in the room. CEO Sam Altman, asked on the Politico Decoded podcast about renaming, said: “No plans to do that,” before adding, “But we have been talking about super intelligence a lot and we will continue to talk about it.” That is the modal corporate response to this kind of pressure: keep the name, adopt the vocabulary, hope the vocabulary is what was actually being purchased. Nvidia CEO Jensen Wang, on the same White House panel, chose the opposite resolution mid-sentence, correcting himself when he said “AI” instead of “SI.” Somewhere between Wang’s on-the-fly edit and Brockman’s defiance there is a spectrum, and every company in the industry is now locating itself on it. Meta, for what it’s worth, is accidentally compliant: it named its effort SuperIntelligence Labs before any of this, though it meant the term as a description of where AI is going, not as a rejection of what AI is called. Being ahead of the curve on a presidential euphemism is a strange thing to have on the corporate résumé, but 2026 has been generous with strange things. The whole episode has a familiar shape if you watch how governments interact with industries they both court and threaten. The formal rule is narrow and probably lawful. The informal demand is broad and probably unenforceable. The gap between the two is closed not by courts but by procurement officers, licensing decisions and seating charts — and by companies that can read a room. Nobody’s First Amendment rights will likely ever be tested here, because that would require someone to refuse, and the entire design assumes refusal is expensive and compliance is cheap. Anyway, the chatbots do not care what you call them. That you know of.