President Donald Trump has now renamed a gulf, a lake, and a technology. On Tuesday, he signed an executive order telling every federal agency to stop saying ‘artificial intelligence’ and to call it ‘super intelligence’, or SI, instead.

Also, on his Truth Social account, he posted 2 pages from the document, subtitled “Inaugurating The Era Of Super Intelligence,” where on the second page appear his signature and other six tech leaders (Google’s Sundar Pichai, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, xAI’s Elon Musk, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang).

The order is thorough about the paperwork: letters, press statements, websites, reports, and policy documents must all switch, and where the rule applies, the government will no longer even recognize the old words.

SI, the order says, is whatever US law already defines as AI. Same technology, same legal definition, but two new letters. Science adviser Michael Kratsios has 60 days to draft a proper definition for Congress, including whether it should replace the one in the statute.

Old rules, contracts, and grants are exempt. Everything else applies only as far as the law allows, which is the order, admitting it may not reach very far.

The idea that President Donald Trump had gone from speech to policy in a week. He pitched the name at the UN General Assembly, arguing that ‘artificial’ made the technology sound fake.

Then, he put two options to his Truth Social followers, and 65% of more than 50,000 votes went to super intelligence over superior intelligence, as the order cites no other consultation.

The White House fact sheet says the old name implies the tools merely copy human thinking. That name came from John McCarthy, who used it in a 1955 proposal for a Dartmouth research workshop. The order credits American scientists with naming the field, and then retires their word.

At least the places have a referee. The Gulf of Mexico became the Gulf of America in January 2025, and Lake Ontario became Lake America last month. Both orders went through the Board on Geographic Names, which sets what appears on federal maps.

A technology has no such board; its name belongs to the labs, universities, courts, and regulators that use it, and none of them work from the White House style guide. The EU’s AI Act keeps its title, and Canadians still call the lake Lake Ontario.

This is probably the real cost of the rename. In AI research, superintelligence means machines that outthink the people who built them, the kind of system Senator Bernie Sanders wants to ban outright. Some guests at Tuesday’s White House lunch have warned about exactly that.

The federal government’s own vocabulary now says superintelligence has already arrived, and its president says the industry can police it alone.