One Month In: Tracking the White House AI Rebrand and Loyalty Test
A month after President Trump ordered federal agencies to use 'Super Intelligence' instead of 'AI', adoption across government, media, and Big Tech remains uneven.
In late September, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace the term artificial intelligence with “Super Intelligence,” often abbreviated as “SI.” The decision followed a poll on X where the winning phrase beat out other options like “Supreme Intelligence” and “Extreme Intelligence.” The administration's stated justification is that modern systems enhance human ingenuity rather than merely imitate intelligence, meaning government language should match. However, critics point out that this directive mirrors past rebranding efforts designed to signal political alignment.
Historically, these linguistic shifts serve as de facto loyalty tests, where using the designated vocabulary demonstrates allegiance while ignoring it can draw public criticism. For instance, the administration previously barred the Associated Press from White House events after the news outlet declined to adopt the term “Gulf of America.” While prior renamings focused on geographical features or specific institutions, applying this pattern to a technology that two-thirds of Americans interact with weekly represents a unique challenge.
Adoption Across Government and Media
One month after the directive, implementation within the federal government remains mixed. The term “SI” now appears more frequently in procurement documents, such as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement request for surveillance technology in detention facilities. Several government websites have quietly swapped out the terminology, and agencies like the National Institutes of Health have added transition banners warning visitors about the mix of old and new labels.
At the same time, friction is evident. The Pentagon launched Project Meridian using traditional terminology, and recent press releases from the Department of Health and Human Services alongside the Federal Trade Commission have mixed terms or utilized lowercase variants. National lab researchers and cabinet officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have also accidentally slipped back into using standard acronyms during interviews.
Outside government, the push to change public vocabulary has faced hurdles. President Trump recently criticized the Wall Street Journal on Truth Social for continuing to use traditional phrasing, hinting at upcoming rules that could explicitly ban “artificial intelligence” from government paperwork. Even Newsmax, an outlet known for supporting presidential policies, has not fully adopted the new term.
Big Tech and the Impact on Public Discourse
Big Tech leadership has displayed a similarly split response. On the day of the executive order, six major technology leaders—Sundar Pichai of Google, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Elon Musk of xAI, and Jensen Huang of Nvidia—signed the nonbinding White House Accord on Super Intelligence. Despite this, third-quarter earnings call data analyzed by CNBC shows that only Zuckerberg and Musk utilized the preferred phrasing consistently. Musk even suggested renaming SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, though he continues to mix terminology on social media. Executives from Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet largely stuck to conventional terminology, though Microsoft referenced a “Super Intelligence era” in a letter to shareholders.
Beyond questions of administrative efficiency and taxpayer costs—such as federal employees drafting new legislative definitions and guidance documents—observers note potential consequences for public discourse. Because artificial intelligence remains a central topic for voters heading into midterm elections, transforming technical vocabulary into a partisan signal risks fracturing everyday conversations about the technology's societal impacts.
What it means for developers
While political debates over terminology unfold in Washington and boardrooms, builders continue focusing on practical applications. For developers looking to experiment with cutting-edge capabilities, you can try top AI models cheaply through one API at https://apixoai.online, accessing leading systems from providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google without managing multiple billing relationships. As national discussions and regulatory definitions continue to evolve, the underlying infrastructure and accessibility of these models remain essential for ongoing software development.
Source: Here’s who is falling in line for Trump’s “Super Intelligence” loyalty test — MIT Technology Review AI. Written by the Apixo team from that report.
One key for Claude, GPT, GLM, DeepSeek and more. Pay per token with crypto.
Get your API key
