AI Renamed Super Intelligence: What It Means

On September 29, 2026, the President signed an order titled Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence. The Super Intelligence executive order, EO 14434, tells every federal agency to stop writing artificial intelligence and write Super Intelligence instead, with SI replacing AI.

If AI appears on your homepage or in your product names, you might be wondering whether you’re expected to follow. You aren’t. The order speaks to federal agencies only, and I think renaming your own pages would cost you searches rather than win them.

What the order changes

Section 2 tells executive departments and agencies to use Super Intelligence and SI in official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents and other non-statutory documents, to the maximum extent the law allows. Section 1 adds that the executive branch won’t acknowledge the older terms in any applicable setting. So expect agency websites and new solicitations to say SI from here on.

The technology being named doesn’t change. Section 3 defines Super Intelligence as whatever the current legal definition of artificial intelligence (15 U.S.C. 9401(3)) already covers. In federal paperwork, a chatbot that was AI on September 28 became SI on September 30, and nothing new is being regulated. The White House’s stated reason is that today’s systems do more than imitate human intelligence, so the name should say so.

What it leaves alone

Quite a lot. Section 2(b) says nobody has to rewrite regulations, presidential actions, contracts, grants or other documents issued before the order. Statutes still say artificial intelligence, because a president can’t amend a law by order.

That may change later. Michael Kratsios, the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, has 60 days (until November 28, 2026) to send proposed legislative language: a federal definition of Super Intelligence, a view on whether it should replace or expand the legal definition of AI, and amendments to statutes that use the old term. Only Congress can turn that into law. On the same day, several AI company leaders signed a separate, voluntary White House Accord on Super Intelligence, covering internal controls and outside testing for frontier models. It has no enforcement and doesn’t require the companies to adopt the new name.

Should your website switch to Super Intelligence?

No, and the reason is search. People type the words they already use, and a change to agency letterhead won’t change what your customers type when they look for an AI receptionist or an AI photo editor. Swap AI for SI in your titles and headings and you’re writing for a phrase your customers would have to learn first.

The term also comes with baggage. Superintelligence already meant something specific: AI that outperforms humans at nearly everything. It’s the subject of Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book Superintelligence and the name behind labs like Meta Superintelligence Labs and Safe Superintelligence Inc. Search engines and AI assistants have years of pages that use the word that way. Call your booking chatbot Super Intelligence and you’re making a claim it can’t back up, in front of readers who were looking for something else.

SI on its own is worse. The same two letters already stand for the metric system’s units, Sports Illustrated and, in a lot of B2B work, systems integrator.

What I’d change on a website

Very little. These are the edits I’d make, and only where they fit the page:

• Keep AI in your page titles, headings and product names.
• Where it helps, add one plain sentence that links the two terms, such as “Our assistant uses AI (which US federal agencies now call Super Intelligence, or SI).” A reader coming from the news gets the connection, and search engines and AI assistants see both terms tied to your page in your own words.
• If you sell to federal agencies, use their wording in proposals, capability statements and the landing page you send them to, with AI beside it. Contracts you’ve already signed don’t need to change.
• Never write SI alone without spelling it out first.
• Check back after November 28. If Congress writes a new legal definition, it could reach contracts and compliance paperwork, and that’s when the wording starts to matter for businesses.

What I did on this site

I added Super Intelligence to the AI search topics in this site’s llms.txt file, the plain-text summary of the site that AI crawlers can read, next to ChatGPT and Perplexity. Everywhere else the site still says AI, because that’s what the people I build for search for.

Getting found in AI answers is part of what I do for clients through AI search optimization. If you want to know where your own site stands, start with the 5-minute test in Get Recommended by ChatGPT & AI Search, or send me your URL and I’ll run it for you.

Common questions