What Is SI? Super Intelligence, the New Name for AI, Explained

SI stands for Super Intelligence. It is the name the U.S. federal government now uses for the technology most people still call artificial intelligence: chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, image and video generators, recommendation engines, fraud detectors, self-driving systems and much more.

The change came from Executive Order 14434, “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence”, signed on September 29, 2026. It tells every federal executive agency to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in place of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI”.

SI in one minute

• What it is: a new name for artificial intelligence, not a new technology.
• Who uses it: U.S. federal executive agencies are required to. Everyone else can choose.
• Legal meaning: exactly the same as the existing U.S. legal definition of artificial intelligence (15 U.S.C. § 9401(3)).
• Not to be confused with: superintelligence (ASI), a hypothetical future system far smarter than any human. See SI vs superintelligence.
• What’s next: the White House owes Congress a proposed new legal definition of SI by about November 28, 2026.

Where the term came from

President Donald Trump floated the rename in his address to the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, 2026. Rejecting any “globalist scheme to control” the technology, he said “the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now” would be “officially called super intelligence”, because “the use of the word artificial … makes it sound fake, and it is not fake.”

A week later, on September 29, he signed Executive Order 14434. The order argues that today’s systems “do much more than imitate or automate discrete aspects of human intelligence” and that “the term ‘Super Intelligence’ more appropriately captures the promise, potential, and rapidly advancing capabilities of these technologies.”

On the same day, the leaders of Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI and Nvidia signed a separate, voluntary White House Accord on Super Intelligence on safety oversight. The order was published in the Federal Register on October 2, 2026.

What counts as SI?

Section 3 of the order gives SI a precise legal meaning. It covers “the technologies and systems encompassed by the term ‘artificial intelligence’ as defined in section 9401(3) of title 15, United States Code.” That statute, from the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act of 2020, defines AI 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.”

In practice, everything that counted as AI on September 28, 2026 counts as SI today. That includes:

• Generative SI, systems that write text, code, images, audio or video, such as large language models. See generative SI.
• Predictive systems that score credit risk, detect fraud or forecast demand.
• Perception systems such as facial recognition, medical image analysis and speech recognition.
• Autonomous systems such as self-driving cars, drones and SI agents that take actions on a computer.

Is SI the same as superintelligence?

No, and this is the most common source of confusion. Long before 2026, researchers used “superintelligence” (or artificial superintelligence, ASI) for a hypothetical intelligence that “greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains,” in philosopher Nick Bostrom’s words. No such system exists today.

The order’s “Super Intelligence” is written as two words and refers to today’s technology. A spam filter is SI under the order. It is nowhere near superintelligence. Our explainer SI vs superintelligence covers the difference in detail.

Who has to use the term?

Only the federal executive branch. Section 2 directs “executive departments and agencies” to use the new terms “in official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents, and other non-statutory documents.”

The order does not bind:

• businesses, universities or non-profits;
• journalists and the public;
• Congress, federal courts or state governments;
• existing laws: statutes such as the EU AI Act or the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act keep their names.

It also says it does not require changing “previously issued regulations, Presidential actions, contracts, grants, or other historical documents.” Many federal contractors and grant applicants are likely to adopt “SI” anyway so their documents match agency language. Our AI → SI Converter and SI Style Guide help with that.

Why rename AI? The arguments

Supporters argue that “artificial” undersells what frontier systems can now do: write software, assist scientific discovery and run multi-step tasks on their own. The White House fact sheet argues that the new name better reflects what the technology does, in its words “unlocking new forms of human creativity” rather than “simply imitating or automating human intelligence”.

Critics see the change as branding rather than substance. California Governor Gavin Newsom responded on September 30 by signing a state executive order directing California agencies and departments under his authority to keep using “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI”. Researchers worry that borrowing the word “superintelligence”, which in their field means beyond-human AI, will blur important safety debates. Others point out that public skepticism about AI is about jobs, energy use and safety, not the word “artificial”.

The name itself has always been debated. Since John McCarthy coined “artificial intelligence” for the 1956 Dartmouth workshop, alternatives such as “machine intelligence” and “computational intelligence” have come and gone.

What happens next

The order gives the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology 60 days, until about November 28, 2026, to send the President proposed legislative language for a federal definition of SI. That proposal must assess whether the definition should “modify, expand upon, or otherwise supersede” the existing statutory definition of AI, and suggest conforming amendments to laws that mention “artificial intelligence” and “AI”.

Until then, SI legally means exactly what AI meant. We will update this page and our policy tracker as the definition develops.

Other meanings of “SI”

“SI” had plenty of meanings before 2026. Depending on context it can still mean:

• The International System of Units (Système international d’unités): metres, kilograms, seconds. These are “SI units”.
• Slovenia, whose internet country code is .si.
• Sports Illustrated, the magazine.
• Systems integrator in IT, the sacroiliac (SI) joint in medicine, and sí, the Spanish word for “yes”.

On this site, SI always means Super Intelligence.