Federal Agencies Told to Drop 'AI' for 'Super Intelligence'

President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the US executive branch to stop using the term "artificial intelligence" in official policy websites, policy documents and press releases, replacing it with "Super Intelligence."

The federal government has been ordered to change what it calls the most consequential technology of the decade. Under an executive order signed by President Donald Trump, the US executive branch will no longer acknowledge the existence of "artificial intelligence" in its own output. Official policy websites, policy documents and press releases are to refer instead to "Super Intelligence."

The president's stated rationale was linguistic rather than technical. "The word super is the best word of all, and it's the simplest," Trump said, according to The Verge, which reported the order.

Terminology orders are easy to dismiss as cosmetic. This one is not, because "artificial intelligence" is not merely a description in federal usage — it is a defined term that appears in statute, in agency rulemaking, in contract vehicles and in the disclosure language public companies file with regulators. Changing the noun the executive branch uses does not change the noun Congress wrote, and that gap is where the practical work begins.

Where a word change becomes an administrative project

Every cabinet department and independent agency that touches this technology maintains a body of published material: strategy documents, inspector general reports, grant notices, public comment dockets, FAQ pages, model cards for internally deployed systems. The order, as described, covers policy websites, policy documents and press releases. That is a wide surface area and it is maintained by communications and policy staff, not by lawyers.

Three questions will decide how disruptive the transition actually is, and none of them are answered by the order's headline instruction:

• Does it reach backward? Retrofitting archived documents is a different exercise from changing forward-looking style guidance. Archived federal material is frequently cited in litigation and in academic work, and altering it silently creates its own problems.
• Does it reach statutory language? Where a law or a regulation uses "artificial intelligence" as a defined term, an agency cannot unilaterally substitute another phrase without introducing ambiguity about what is being regulated.
• Does it reach contracts? Solicitations, statements of work and vendor qualification criteria are written in precise vocabulary for a reason. Bidders search them by keyword.

That last point is the least glamorous and the most likely to generate friction. Companies that sell to the government find opportunities through keyword matching across federal procurement databases. If a notice that would once have read "artificial intelligence services" now reads "Super Intelligence services," the vendors most likely to miss it are the small ones without a dedicated capture team — precisely the suppliers agencies say they want more of.

The mismatch with how companies describe themselves

Publicly traded companies do not get to pick their vocabulary freely either. Risk factors, revenue segment descriptions and management commentary in annual and quarterly filings use "artificial intelligence" because that is the term investors, analysts and accounting standards-setters recognize. A company whose government contracts start arriving under a different label still has to reconcile the two in its own disclosures.

The likeliest outcome is redundancy rather than replacement: federal documents carrying the new term while everything surrounding them — filings, earnings calls, industry standards bodies, international agreements — keeps the old one. Translation layers of that kind are survivable. They are also a recurring, low-grade tax on compliance staff who now have to maintain a mapping between two names for the same thing.

There is a substantive wrinkle as well. "Superintelligence" already carries a specific meaning in technical and policy debate: a hypothetical system exceeding human capability across essentially all domains. It is a term of art associated with existential-risk arguments and, more recently, with legislative proposals aimed at restricting such systems. Applying it as a blanket label to everything from fraud-detection models to chatbots collapses a distinction that safety researchers and lawmakers have spent years drawing. Whatever one thinks of that debate, the merger of the two vocabularies makes federal documents less precise, not more.

Markets treated it as noise, not news

Nothing in the session suggested investors repriced anything on the basis of the order. The S&P 500 tracker (NYSEARCA: SPY) finished at $764.20, down 0.18% from the prior close of $765.61, inside a day range of $762.35 to $766.98, as of the last trade at 20:00 GMT on September 29, 2026. The Dow 30 fund (NYSEARCA: DIA) closed at $512.88, off 0.22%.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 tracker (NASDAQ: QQQ) was the outlier on the upside, ending at $737.93, up 0.19% from $736.53, having traded between $735.34 and $740.58. That is a narrow, unremarkable day for the index most exposed to the companies this order describes — which is the point. Rebranding a category does not alter compute budgets, chip orders, enterprise contracts or the underlying demand picture.

What could matter later is regulatory clarity. AI-sector valuations rest in part on assumptions about how the technology will be governed in its largest market. Policy that makes government language harder to map onto industry language adds a small amount of interpretive risk to those assumptions. Small is not zero, but it is not the kind of thing that moves an index in an afternoon.

What to watch in the weeks ahead

The first concrete signals will be mundane and easy to check. Watch whether agency landing pages and strategy documents change their headings, and whether the substituted term appears in new procurement notices or only in press releases. Watch whether agencies publish crosswalk guidance telling contractors that the new phrase covers the same scope as the statutory term — the absence of such guidance would be the clearest sign that the order was written as messaging rather than as administrative policy.

Watch, too, for divergence between departments. Agencies with heavy statutory obligations tied to the defined term have more reason to hedge than agencies whose output is largely communications. If some parts of the executive branch comply fully and others use both terms in parallel, the resulting inconsistency will show up first in contractor complaints and in public comment dockets.

The companies selling into this market have no realistic option other than to accommodate both vocabularies. The cost of doing so is measured in staff hours rather than dollars anyone will report. But federal language is not just branding — it is the index under which billions of dollars of work gets found, bid and awarded. Renaming the index is never free.

Key facts

• Order: Executive order signed by President Donald Trump replacing "artificial intelligence" with "Super Intelligence" in executive branch usage
• Scope: Official policy websites, policy documents and press releases
• QQQ close: $737.93, +0.19%, as of 20:00 GMT Sept 29, 2026
• SPY close: $764.20, -0.18% (prev close $765.61), as of 20:00 GMT Sept 29, 2026

Frequently asked questions

What does the executive order actually require?

It directs the US executive branch to stop acknowledging the existence of "artificial intelligence" in its own output. Going forward, official policy websites, policy documents and press releases are to refer only to "Super Intelligence." President Donald Trump signed the order, saying "The word super is the best word of all, and it's the simplest."

Does this change any actual AI regulation?

No. The order concerns terminology used by the executive branch in its published materials, not the substance of any rule, statute or enforcement action. Laws passed by Congress that use "artificial intelligence" as a defined term still use it, which is why agencies may need guidance explaining that the new phrase covers the same scope.

How did markets react?

There was no visible reaction. As of the last trade at 20:00 GMT on September 29, 2026, the S&P 500 tracker SPY closed at $764.20, down 0.18%; the Dow fund DIA closed at $512.88, down 0.22%; and the Nasdaq 100 tracker QQQ closed at $737.93, up 0.19%. All three sat well within ordinary daily ranges.

Why does the wording matter for government contractors?

Federal procurement notices are found by keyword. Vendors search contract databases for phrases like "artificial intelligence services." If solicitations are reworded, suppliers without dedicated capture teams may simply fail to see relevant opportunities, which tends to disadvantage smaller bidders more than large incumbents.

Is 'superintelligence' the same thing as artificial intelligence?

Not in technical usage. "Superintelligence" conventionally refers to a hypothetical system exceeding human capability across essentially all domains, a concept central to AI risk debates and to recent legislative proposals. Applying it as a general label to all AI systems collapses a distinction that researchers and lawmakers have drawn deliberately.

Will companies have to change their SEC filings?

Nothing in the order reaches private disclosure. Public companies describe their business using terms investors and standards-setters recognize, and "artificial intelligence" remains that term. The practical result is likely parallel vocabularies — federal documents using one label while filings, earnings calls and industry standards use another.

Sources

• Trump orders US government to call AI ‘Super Intelligence’ — The Verge

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