Washington Says ‘SI’ Now. The Law It Points To Still Says AI.

The Justice Department’s press release on Oct. 1 reads like a hundred export-control cases before it, until the first sentence reaches the chips. Greg Lui, 38, of San Gabriel, Calif., was arrested on a three-count federal indictment, the department said, charged with smuggling more than US$300 million (CA$417 million) worth of export-controlled servers to China. The servers held U.S.-made GPUs “commonly used for Super Intelligence (SI) applications.”

Not AI. SI.

The department alleges the servers moved through Malaysia and Singapore. An indictment is an allegation, and Lui is presumed innocent. But the vocabulary is the story. “SI is the defining technology of the era,” said John A. Eisenberg, the assistant attorney general for national security. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli spoke of “keeping our advanced Super Intelligence technology” from adversaries. Those are federal prosecutors, two days after the president told them which word to use.

Nine days from a speech to a charging release

The rename moved fast. Trump first floated alternatives on Truth Social, including “superior,” “extreme” and “supreme” intelligence, and polled his followers, ThePrint reports. At the UN General Assembly on Sept. 22 he made the case, as the AP recorded it: “The use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake and it is not fake. It’s actually amazing.”

That same day, a State Department official emailed staff under the subject line “Change in Nomenclature AI to SI,” per the AP: “Following the president’s remarks at the GA today, please change all references of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ to ‘Super Intelligence’ in our documents and positions.”

On Sept. 29 Trump signed an executive order titled “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence.” At a White House event, Axios reports, he put it plainly: “We can say the word super, because the other word is a fake word.” Leaders from Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI and Nvidia signed a “White House Accord on Super Intelligence,” and Axios says some executives told it their companies plan to use “SI” when working with the president and the federal government.

Read the definitions section

Here is the part worth pinning to the wall. The order directs agencies to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in “official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents, and other non-statutory documents.” It says the executive branch “will not acknowledge the usage of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI’ in any applicable setting.”

Then it defines its new term. Super Intelligence means “the technologies and systems encompassed by the term ‘artificial intelligence’ as defined in section 9401(3) of title 15, United States Code.”

In other words, by the order’s own terms, SI is AI. Same statute, same scope, new label. The order doesn’t touch existing regulations, contracts or grants, and it gives Michael Kratsios, the president’s science and technology adviser, 60 days to propose legislative language for a federal definition, as Forbes summarizes.

The order’s own preamble supplies an awkward footnote. It boasts that the field “was born in the United States, where American scientists first gave the field its name.” The administration is proud of the name it is retiring.

What a word does

This is my opinion, and I’ll label it as one. Renaming a technology changes nothing about what it can do. It changes what a reader assumes before the facts arrive.

In research circles, superintelligence already meant something specific: hypothetical systems whose abilities outstrip humans across a broad range of areas. Experts quoted by ThePrint say the term is “generally reserved for a much more advanced stage of AI, which does not currently exist.” So a GPU now described as built for “Super Intelligence applications” sounds closer to a strategic weapon than the same chip did a month ago. In a smuggling case, that framing helps the prosecution’s story. In a sales pitch, it helps the seller. It does not help a jury, a regulator or a reader trying to work out what a server actually does.

Axios framed the rebrand as Trump and CEOs trying to shed AI’s toxic branding. The public is not obviously buying it. A YouGov poll conducted the week of the White House event found 53% of respondents thought “artificial intelligence” was the better term, versus 9% for “super intelligence,” per Axios.

Outside the executive branch, nothing has to change. Courts, Congress, Canadian regulators and every newsroom, including this one, can keep saying AI. We will.

The statute the order leans on, 15 U.S.C. 9401(3), still reads “artificial intelligence.” Until Congress amends it, every “SI” in a federal document is a translation back to that phrase.