Trump Renamed AI 'Super Intelligence,' and Six Companies Signed On to Police Themselves

On Tuesday, September 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing every federal department and agency to stop using the term "artificial intelligence" and to use "Super Intelligence," or "SI," instead. The same day he released a one-page voluntary accord, signed by him and six technology executives, that asks their companies to audit themselves. This episode is an original rap track about the two documents and what each of them actually says.

The order covers executive-branch usage. Agencies are told to use the new terms in official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports and policy documents, and the executive branch "will not acknowledge the usage of 'Artificial Intelligence' and 'AI' in any applicable setting." It does not alter previously issued regulations, contracts, grants or historical documents, and it does not change the law: for the order's purposes, "Super Intelligence" and "SI" mean exactly the technologies already defined as artificial intelligence in section 9401(3) of title 15 of the U.S. Code. Within 60 days, the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology is to submit proposed legislative language for a federal definition of Super Intelligence, with a recommendation on whether the statutory definition should be modified, expanded or superseded. 12

The accord, titled "White House Accord on Super Intelligence: A Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities," was signed by Sundar Pichai of Google, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Elon Musk of SpaceX and Jensen Huang of Nvidia. It says each company is responsible for developing its own technology safely, and asks for four layers of controls and audits: internal controls monitoring model capabilities and alignment during training and deployment around cybersecurity, biosecurity and chemical threats, "to ensure that its models do not hack or access technical systems in unintended ways"; an internal team making sure those controls, monitoring and detection work and that issues are remediated; an independent external auditor or evaluator assessing whether they are working; and an independent committee of the board of directors to receive those reports. The companies "will meet regularly" to set standards and best practices, and the document adds that "over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations." 3

It carries no penalty for a company that skips any of it, no requirement to publish audit results or name the auditor, and no duty to report an incident to a government body. Asked whether the document was binding, Trump said it is "morally binding," and "It's almost like a constitution, in a way." Speaker Mike Johnson called what was signed a "statement of principles" with voluntary commitments and "layers of internal and external review." 45

On the rename, Trump said at a White House event that "the word super is the best word of all, and it's the simplest," and that "we don't want to hear artificial." 6 A Quinnipiac University poll released the same afternoon, taken September 24 to 27 with a margin of error of 3.8 points, found 25% of respondents approve of how the president has handled AI and 58% disapprove. Senator Mark Warner said a rename "does nothing to address the very real risks that come with increasingly powerful AI systems." An AI czar is expected to be named within three or four days, and Axios reports the accord's scope and enforcement remain unclear because full details have not been released. 7

Nothing here is settled. The legislative language is not due for 60 days, the auditors are not named, no audit results have been promised for publication, and the accord would not have required any company to report an incident sooner than it chose to. 8