On Friday Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, posted on X: “The era of Super Intelligence is here. AIForce is officially SIForce.” If you’re wondering what changed, two letters did. AIForce is Salesforce’s agent platform. The company itself is still called Salesforce, presumably because nobody has yet thought of a way to put “SI” in it.
Benioff isn’t the only one. As Business Insider reported, Elon Musk said last Sunday that SpaceXAI would become SpaceXSI, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella wrote “Super Intelligence” in a Saturday X post about AI model containment and governance. Nadella has said “superintelligence” before, but this was the first time he used two words with capital letters, which is the version the White House prefers. The outlets disagree on how far Musk has got. Business Insider says the company’s X account has already switched over, while CNN says the change “has not yet occurred.” Either way, the promise was made.
Here is why everyone is so keen. On Thursday, President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social: “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!” We covered that declaration at the time. It builds on an executive order from September 29, signed the same day Trump hosted tech executives for lunch and, according to Fox Business, announced a separate voluntary accord with industry. The order tells federal agencies to say “Super Intelligence” and “SI” instead of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” in official communications, websites, reports and policy documents, to the extent the law allows. Private companies are not covered. They’re just told they will be the enemy if they don’t go along.
The part I find most interesting is the definitions section. According to a summary by the law firm Freshfields, the order says “Super Intelligence” and “SI” “mean the technologies and systems encompassed by the term ‘artificial intelligence’ as defined in section 9401(3) of title 15, United States Code.” So in the eyes of the law, Super Intelligence is AI. It is a find-and-replace. Nothing got smarter. Old regulations, contracts and grants keep the old wording. The order also gives the president’s science and technology adviser 60 days to propose legislative language that would define the new term properly, as the IAPP noted. In other words the government renamed the thing first and has scheduled the job of deciding what the name means for later.
Why do this? The White House’s stated reason is that AI has outgrown its name: the order says today’s systems increasingly amplify human creativity and that “Super Intelligence” better captures their potential. Trump put it more simply at the United Nations last month: “use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake.” At a rally in Nebraska he said he would reassign “artificial,” which he called an “ugly” word, to the news media. CNN’s Zachary B. Wolf offers a less flattering explanation. Trump is a major booster of AI, Americans dislike the data centers it needs, and he can’t persuade them otherwise. What he can do is rename things. He has done it with a gulf, a lake, military bases and a mountain.
Sure. Marketing is a real tool, and a president who has already given away the regulatory leverage might as well use it.
But the new word has a problem: it already means something specific. Nick Bostrom, the Oxford philosopher who wrote the 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, told CNN that “AI” has traditionally “been this wide umbrella term that refers to every form of intelligent information processing in machines,” covering everything from Google searches and spam filters to today’s chatbots and “hypothetical future more powerful ones.” “If the idea is to use the new word superintelligence to cover all of that, it’s a little bit of a stretch, maybe, to call my spam filter a superintelligence,” he said. In Bostrom’s usage, superintelligence was the endpoint: a hypothetical system that “not only matched but radically exceeded humans across all cognitive domain.” It is the thing the AI doomers worry about.
He also explained, more clearly than the executive order does, why the rebrand might work:
If you define superintelligence as we already have superintelligence and it hasn’t caused any catastrophe yet, then what’s the big deal? And you then would need to introduce some new term to refer to this like hypothetical future capability that’s even more powerful.
That’s the clever part, whether or not anyone meant it. If the frightening word now officially refers to the thing that writes your quarterly goals, and the world is still here, then the frightening word stops being frightening. Whoever still wants to worry about the real thing will have to invent a new name for it and start from scratch. Bostrom, for his part, says it’s “not up to me to decide how English language should be used,” and adds: “I mean, it’s good for my book sales, I guess.”
Sam Altman is less convinced. He told Politico’s “Decoded” podcast that OpenAI has no plans to become OpenSI. Superintelligence might be a better term than artificial intelligence, he said, but it “still sort of understates the magnitude of what I think is happening,” and he expects people to keep saying AI. “Does superintelligence sound obviously less scary to people than artificial intelligence?” he asked. OpenAI, Scale AI, Character AI and Resolve AI did not respond to Business Insider’s requests for comment, which is understandable. None of them has an easy two-letter fix.
For a company that does have one, the math is simple. Imagine you run a software business with “AI” in a product name. Changing it costs you a press release and some updated slides. Not changing it gets you labelled THE ENEMY by a White House that, by its own account, is the only safeguard the technology needs. “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote in September. With that on offer, renaming your product is about the cheapest bit of compliance you’ll ever buy.
At the UN, Trump compared his rebrand to the renaming of global warming, which he said was “reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead.” That isn’t what happened; the planet has been warming. Still, as an account of how renaming works, it’s revealing: if you pick a reassuring name, people stop asking about the thing it describes.