The more consequential part of President Trump's order renaming artificial intelligence is not the new label but a deadline buried inside it. The executive order signed on 29 September, "Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence," gives the assistant to the president for science and technology 60 days to propose legislative language setting a federal definition of "super intelligence" and identifying which existing statutory references to AI should change.
For now the order borrows the definition already in law. Section 9401 of title 15 of the US Code describes artificial intelligence as a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations or decisions influencing real or virtual environments. That covers a vast range of ordinary software, from fraud scoring to predictive maintenance, and it is deliberately broad.
A new definition written around the words "super intelligence" could be drawn much more narrowly, or much more widely, and whichever way it goes it would determine which systems fall inside future federal rules, reporting duties and procurement requirements. That is the part companies selling technology to the US government should watch, rather than the terminology itself.
What The Order Does And Does Not Do
The order directs federal agencies to use "super intelligence" and "SI" in place of "artificial intelligence" and "AI" across websites, public communications, reports and policy documents, to the maximum extent permitted by law. Trump said the new term "more appropriately captures the promise, potential, and rapidly advancing capabilities of these technologies."
It does not rewrite statutes, and it does not require agencies to revise existing regulations, contracts, grants or historical documents. Private companies are under no obligation to rename anything, state laws are untouched, and the technology itself is unchanged.
Two Vocabularies, One Set Of Systems
The practical result is that two words will describe the same systems depending on where you look. Federal guidance published from now on will say SI, while the statutes it rests on, state laws, existing contracts, international standards and almost every company's own documentation will continue to say AI.
Organisations that work across those contexts, particularly federal contractors, will need to map one vocabulary onto the other in policies, compliance documents and bids. It also makes federal material harder to search, since documents on the same subject will be filed under different terms depending on when they were written.
The Procurement Question
The sharpest practical risk sits in government buying. Procurement officers writing requirements need to know whether SI covers every system previously called AI or a narrower class of unusually capable ones, and until the definition is settled, that ambiguity can work its way into solicitations and contract terms.
A vendor bidding on a federal contract that specifies SI capabilities, or that imposes obligations on SI systems, will want the contract to say which definition applies. The same question runs through compliance work more broadly, since the line between a regulated system and an ordinary piece of software is drawn by a definition, not by a name, a point that matters in every setting where AI agents run devices and systems on a company's behalf.
A Word That Already Meant Something Else
The choice of term carries its own problem. In AI research, superintelligence has long described a hypothetical machine intelligence that exceeds human ability across most domains, a future possibility rather than a description of current systems.
Applying it to all AI collapses that distinction, which matters because lawmakers have been drafting proposals aimed specifically at highly capable systems. If the statutory definition arrives written around today's broad AI language while the word itself suggests something far more advanced, the gap between what a rule says and what people assume it covers will have to be managed in every negotiation.
The Term Has Already Crossed Borders
The rebrand is not confined to US agencies. At their summit on 28 September, Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to establish a US-China Super Intelligence Dialogue to exchange views on the risks and benefits of the technology, along with a bilateral channel for reporting SI incidents, with the next exchange due by November.
Using the new term in a bilateral agreement gives it standing that an internal naming order would not have on its own. It also sets up a mismatch with the rest of the world, since the OECD, NIST, the EU's AI Act, academic researchers and the companies themselves all continue to use artificial intelligence. Any firm operating across jurisdictions now has to reconcile US federal language with everything else.
What Companies Should Do
Nothing in the order requires action from private businesses, and renaming products or internal policies would be premature. The sensible response is to wait for the definition and prepare for it.
Companies that sell to US agencies should watch for the legislative language due by late November, check whether new solicitations use SI and what they mean by it, and ask for the applicable definition to be stated in contracts rather than assumed. Those with federal compliance obligations should note which of their documents use AI and would need updating if the term changes in law, without rewriting them yet.
For everyone else, the useful discipline is to describe systems by what they do rather than by the label attached to them. A document that specifies the function, the data, the decisions a system makes and the oversight around it survives a change of vocabulary. One built around the word AI does not.
The Label Is Cosmetic, The Definition Will Not Be
Renaming artificial intelligence across federal communications changes little by itself, and the order is careful to leave statutes, contracts and state law alone. Treating it as purely cosmetic would be a mistake, because the same order starts a process that could put a new, legally operative definition of these systems into US law.
That definition will decide which systems carry federal obligations and which do not, and it will be written in the next two months. Companies that sell technology to the US government have until then to pay attention to the substance beneath the naming.
