Briefs · Emerging Technologies
Here’s who is falling in line for Trump’s “Super Intelligence” loyalty test
AI is not being renamed. It is being loyalty-tested.
At the end of September, Trump signed an executive order with just one directive: government agencies must rebrand what they had been calling AI as “Super Intelligence” — following a poll on X a couple of weeks earlier. The stated reason: today’s AI systems “amplify human ingenuity”. The word is the test!
One month in, the term is not catching on. The government itself now uses “Super Intelligence” — or simply “SI” — including an ICE request for companies to build “SI-powered” surveillance; yet the day after the order, the Pentagon announced an ambitious new initiative, a press release last week used “superintelligence” instead of the two-word capitalised version ordered by the president, and Health and Human Services show no sign of the new language.
Big Tech is not falling in line either. A CNBC analysis of third-quarter earnings calls found only Zuckerberg and Musk used the term consistently — and Zuckerberg barely counts. Trump has criticised the Wall Street Journal on Truth Social for not using “Super Intelligence”, “the name which virtually everyone else is using, or soon will be [using]”, yet even Newsmax is not using it. It is Voldemort in reverse: a name you must say, or else (sorry, dictionaries).
One objection is cost: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff can decide that SIForce is a better name than AIForce and direct his company to implement that change, but government employees are now spending time writing guides on how departments should navigate the rebrand, and agency leaders must draft a new legislative definition of “Super Intelligence” by the end of this month.
Conclusion: “Super Intelligence” is not a name. It is a password.
Read the original at MIT Technology Review
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