Trump Orders Federal Agencies to Replace AI With Super Intelligence

A week ago, Donald Trump signed an executive order requiring US federal agencies to replace "artificial intelligence," or AI, with "Super Intelligence," or SI, in their documents. The president's argument is simple: the word "artificial" makes one of the world's most influential technologies sound "fake." With one stroke of the pen, the terminology of the entire federal machine changes, and so does the signal Washington sends to the market and to its rivals.

What we know about the order

According to SCMP, the document explicitly instructs agencies to replace the old term with the new one. The portion of the material available at the time of writing gives no details. It is unclear whether the replacement applies to laws, technical standards and contracts already in force. The timeline for the transition is also unknown. For now, this is a declaration about words, not about budgets, chips or export rules. But words carry practical consequences inside a government apparatus: they are what people use to search for programs, structure procurement and classify reporting.

The Chinese counterpoint

In Chinese, the technology is called 人工智能 (réngōng zhìnéng). The first pair of characters, 人工, combines the characters for "person" and "labor." It means "man-made," but the meaning is tied to human involvement, not to forgery. SCMP stresses that the Chinese name puts people at the center, not artificiality.

This fits with how Beijing builds its policy. The 2017 New Generation AI Development Plan set the goal of becoming a global leader by 2030. The 2025 "AI+" initiative talks about the technology permeating the economy: according to official targets, more than 70% of new intelligent terminals and agents by 2027 and over 90% by 2030. Here the technology is presented as a tool for industry and for people. In the US, it is now to be named for its superiority over humans.

Why SI creates confusion

In the industry, "superintelligence" already has an established meaning: a hypothetical system that surpasses humans across a broad range of tasks. Brands and strategies are built around the word today, from Meta Superintelligence Labs to Safe Superintelligence. If current language models become "superintelligence" in official documents, the boundaries that the debate on safety and threshold-based regulatory regimes rests on will blur. There is also a mundane collision: SI is already taken by the International System of Units.

Key parameters of the story:

• Document: executive order, signed last week.
• Replacement: "artificial intelligence" (AI) with "Super Intelligence" (SI).
• Addressees: US federal agencies.
• Motive: the word "artificial" sounds "fake."
• Chinese term: 人工智能, four characters, with the meaning centered on people.
• Chinese targets: leadership by 2030 (2017 plan), 70% and 90% agent penetration by 2027 and 2030 ("AI+").

What teams should do

Companies with government contracts should check their bid templates, tender keywords and product descriptions in advance: agencies may start filtering them by the new terminology. The most practical approach is to keep a dual AI/SI glossary and not rename public products until clarifications and deadlines are published.

Editors and analysts need to clearly separate the official "SI" in US documents from "superintelligence" as a technical term. Developers and product managers working in both markets should keep two logics in mind: in China, the wording keeps a human at the center, while in the US the image of a superintelligence displaces it. The most important details will be in the text of the order itself: what exactly changes, where and by what date.