White House Orders Federal Agencies to Replace 'AI' with 'Super Intelligence'

The White House has instructed federal agencies to eliminate the phrase "artificial intelligence" from official documents, mandating the use of "super intelligence" instead.

The directive applies across the executive branch. It requires departments to update internal memorandums, regulatory frameworks, procurement guidelines, and public communications. President Donald Trump announced the policy change, asserting that standard technical terminology fails to convey the scale of modern computational capability.

The order introduces substantial administrative complexity across federal operations. Existing United States statutes, including the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act, explicitly define oversight mechanisms using the phrase "artificial intelligence". Procurement contracts, national laboratory research programmes, and export control regimes also ground compliance thresholds in this established terminology.

Civil servants and legal counsels must now align binding statutory text with the administration's mandated vocabulary. Legal analysts note that federal agencies cannot unilaterally amend congressional statutes through executive directives. Consequently, departments may have to maintain parallel terminologies: statutory language for formal compliance filings, and White House-mandated wording for policy releases and agency correspondence.

The shift also affects standard-setting bodies such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Over several years, technical working groups have calibrated risk management frameworks, evaluation benchmarks, and compute metrics around precise definitions of artificial intelligence. Applying "super intelligence" to conventional systems—ranging from automated statistical models to large language models—blurs the distinction between narrow machine learning and frontier artificial general intelligence.

International partners face similar friction. Multilateral frameworks negotiated through the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the G7 employ standardised definitions of AI to coordinate safety evaluations and hardware export rules. A unilateral vocabulary shift inside the federal government risks creating discrepancies in international joint statements and bilateral technical agreements.

Agency administrators have begun reviewing current documentation to identify instances of the banned term. However, the directive provides little guidance on how procurement officers should handle active commercial agreements that specify delivery criteria for artificial intelligence systems.

Can the federal bureaucracy reconcile the mandated rebranding with statutory requirements without compromising the enforcement of established technical standards?