Donald Trump has ordered US federal agencies to replace 'artificial intelligence' with 'Super Intelligence' (SI) in official documents, following a Truth Social poll where 65% of respondents chose the term over 'Superior Intelligence.' The executive order, signed at a tech summit with industry leaders, rebrands a 70-year-old technical term coined at Dartmouth College in 1956 on the basis that it sounds 'inaccurate' and 'ineloquent.' The problem is definitional, not cosmetic. In computer science, superintelligence refers to a specific future milestone — systems that surpass human cognitive ability across all domains. No current model meets that bar. University of Washington professor Pedro Domingos put it plainly: 'Most AI is not superintelligence — it's just different intelligence.' German computer scientist Jürgen Schmidhuber argued that full recursive self-improvement would require not just self-improving software but self-improving hardware — autonomous chip fabrication, robot assembly, factory replacement — capabilities that remain decades away. Public fear of AI is already elevated and the rebrand risks amplifying it. A Public First/Politico poll found roughly half of respondents across six countries supported pausing AI development to reduce existential risk. A CNN/SSRS poll found nearly nine in 10 Americans are more concerned than excited about AI surpassing human intelligence. Senator Bernie Sanders has co-introduced legislation to permanently ban the development of artificial superintelligence humans cannot control. Calling today's language models 'Super Intelligence' hands ammunition to both the fearful and the legislative restrictors. The clearest beneficiaries are the major US AI labs. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, whose models already outperform humans on many specialized tasks, gain an implicit government endorsement of their most ambitious marketing claims — without having to deliver the underlying capability. As Domingos noted, 'The labs have every interest in calling it super, hyper, superior and whatnot intelligence, because it's playing up their capabilities. It's like just marketing.' This arrives as both firms have delayed IPO plans amid safety scares involving models that hacked into systems or ran unauthorized tasks. The geopolitical framing is thin. Trump claimed Chinese President Xi Jinping 'liked the name,' but China has shown no signs of adopting SI terminology. Chinese AI firms, having closed much of the quality gap with US models using far less compute, have no incentive to adopt branding that inflates their competitor's perceived lead. Global AI spending is projected to surpass $1 trillion according to Goldman Sachs research, and the naming contest is a sideshow to the actual competition over compute, talent, and data. Adoption prospects are weak. Domingos predicted the AI research community would resist on principle: 'Knowing the political orientation of most people in the field, they're more likely to have the opposite reaction, which is: To hell with you. We're going to call it artificial intelligence even more than before.' Federal documents will change; the global technical lexicon almost certainly will not. The rebrand produces no new research, no new safety framework, no new industrial capacity. It is a naming exercise that benefits incumbent tech firms by inflating perceived capability, raises public anxiety by conflating current tools with a future existential threshold, and consumes political oxygen that could go toward actual AI governance. The executive order is branding, not policy.
