When Donald Trump announced he wanted artificial intelligence renamed “super intelligence”, skepticism was fair. Most people still say AI. Part of Silicon Valley has switched anyway, and The Verge spent Sunday counting who.
Who has switched so far
Elon Musk moved early, promising to rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI. Marc Benioff followed within hours of Trump’s post, the one declaring that the White House considers anyone using the term “Artificial Intelligence” rather than “the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’” to be “THE ENEMY!” Salesforce is now turning AIForce into SIForce.
Jensen Huang was at the summit where the executive order requiring federal agencies to use the term was announced. He thinks the dangers of AI are overblown. So when Nvidia’s one-billion-dollar pledge toward scientific advancement turned out to explicitly include “super intelligence research”, nobody was surprised.
The latest is Satya Nadella. In his post about an emergency brake for AI models he uses “super intelligence” throughout. He was at that summit too, alongside Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, Dario Amodei and Musk.
Why a word choice is news
Trump’s sentence contains no argument, only a threat. Use the old word and you’re the enemy. Four of the industry’s most prominent names switching within days isn’t a debate about terminology, then. It’s a loyalty test that costs nothing and shows up immediately.
Anthropic is missing from The Verge’s list, even though Dario Amodei was in the room at that summit. Jay Clayton’s Super Intelligence Force carries the term in its name.
Sitting it out is a position too.
A word that describes the wrong thing
The term is also nonsense on its own terms. In AI research, “superintelligence” has meant something specific for decades: a system that surpasses humans at everything. It doesn’t exist. Once agency paperwork calls every language model that, US government documents will be describing superintelligence deployed in tax administration.
For those of us who write about these systems and work with them, that has an unpleasant side effect. The one word available for naming the actual risk is now a marketing label for autocomplete. Getting that vocabulary back will be harder than the rename was.