Big Tech is increasingly signing on to President Donald Trump’s audacious federal campaign to rebrand artificial intelligence (AI) as super intelligence.
Last month’s directive mandates that all federal agencies substitute SI for AI across official communications, websites, and policy documents. Trump escalated the effort on Truth Social, declaring that the White House considers anyone continuing to use the traditional term to be “THE ENEMY!”
While the executive order cannot legally force private firms to comply, key Silicon Valley executives are aligning with the White House directive.
Salesforce Inc. CEO Marc Benioff announced Friday that the company rebranded its agent platform from AIForce to SIForce, declaring on X, “The era of Super Intelligence is here.”
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk pledged to rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI and updated the division’s social media accounts.
Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya Nadella publicly adopted the two-word, capitalized Super Intelligence phrasing in recent posts regarding AI governance.
NVIDIA Corp. CEO Jensen Huang attended the White House summit accompanying the executive order, where the chipmaker committed $1 billion toward scientific advancement while echoing Trump’s view that safety risks are overblown.
The sudden shift has created a rift among leading frontier AI developers. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed his company has “no plans” to rename to “OpenSI,” though OpenAI President Greg Brockman attended the signing summit and signed the White House’s new “Accord on Super Intelligence.”
Brockman and his wife previously donated $25 million to a Trump-aligned political action committee.
Computer scientists and experts warn that forcing the term superintelligence onto current systems distorts technical realities.
Academically, AI serves as a broad umbrella for automated processing, ranging from basic spam filters to advanced language models. By contrast, superintelligence — a concept popularized by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom — specifically describes hypothetical future systems that radically surpass human cognitive abilities across all domains.
“If the idea is to use the new word superintelligence to cover all of that, it’s a little bit of a stretch to call my spam filter a superintelligence,” Bostrom said, though he acknowledged the move provides a clever rhetorical shield against regulatory pushback.
Despite the technical inaccuracies, the White House continues to enforce the mandate. Reports indicate the Department of Justice has already instructed personnel to scrub AI from legal filings, signaling that the administration views vocabulary control as a central pillar of its domestic technology agenda.
Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly, Trump argued the word “artificial” carries a negative connotation.
“Use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake; it makes it sound fake,” Trump said, asserting that the new moniker better reflects the technology’s transformative capabilities. Administration officials acknowledged the rebrand aims to rehabilitate the industry’s public image amid growing pushback against sprawling data centers, environmental concerns, and privacy risks.
