Trump Plans Executive Directive to Rebrand Federal AI as ‘Superintelligence’

Donald Trump has proposed an executive directive to replace the term "artificial intelligence" with "superintelligence" across all federal agencies.

The directive would instruct executive departments to phase out the standard moniker across procurement rules, policy frameworks, and technical standards. Key bodies, including the Department of Commerce, the Department of Defense, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, would be required to scrub "artificial intelligence" from internal guidance documents and public-facing programmes. In its place, federal guidelines would categorise frontier model architectures, automated workflows, and algorithmic analytics under the umbrella of superintelligence.

The proposed rebranding reflects an effort to project national dominance and signal an aggressive posture toward frontier computing. Trump argued that conventional terminology fails to capture the computational scale and geopolitical stakes of emerging model clusters. Under the plan, interagency working groups and federal research grants would shift nomenclature immediately, targeting technical documentation, computing subsidies, and national security directives.

However, legal and procurement specialists warn that altering statutory language by executive fiat faces immediate operational hurdles. Decades of federal legislation, including provisions within the National Defense Authorization Act, explicitly codify the term "artificial intelligence." The Federal Acquisition Regulation system relies on precise statutory definitions to award compute contracts and evaluate machine learning vendors. Overhauling these terms without congressional action risks administrative confusion, contract disputes, and compliance delays across commercial vendors supplying foundation models to federal agencies.

The rebrand also breaks with established technical taxonomy. Within computer science and standards bodies, "superintelligence" typically designates hypothetical systems whose cognitive faculties vastly surpass those of humanity, rather than existing neural networks. Reclassifying narrow systems and commercial large language models under this heading could complicate regulatory harmonisation with allied jurisdictions, including the European Union and the United Kingdom, which tie compliance to conventional technical benchmarks.

Whether federal procurement officers can reconcile a politically mandated vocabulary with existing statutory definitions, or whether the rebrand will simply stall inside federal bureaucracies, remains an open question for both contractors and regulators.