President Donald Trump's attempt to replace the term "artificial intelligence" with "super intelligence" is gaining some high-profile converts in Silicon Valley and among Republican lawmakers, though many of America's biggest technology companies have yet to abandon the familiar AI label.
Trump signed an executive order on September 29 directing executive branch agencies to use "Super Intelligence" and "SI" instead of "Artificial Intelligence" and "AI" in official communications, websites, reports, and other nonstatutory documents.
The order argues that the new name better reflects the "promise, potential, and rapidly advancing capabilities" of the technology.
The announcement coincided with a White House gathering, which was attended by some of the most powerful figures in technology. But nearly two weeks later, a noticeable divide emerged between the tech companies adopting Trump's language and those continuing to use conventional terminology.
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Jensen Huang and Nvidia
Perhaps the clearest industry endorsement of Trump's rebrand has come from Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia.
On October 8, Nvidia announced a $1 billion commitment to advance U.S. science over five years and repeatedly adopted Trump's terminology in its own corporate announcement.
The company said the investment would increase America's capacity for "super intelligence research and development" and referred to "super intelligence infrastructure resources."
Huang went further in his own statement, directly invoking Trump while using the new terminology.
"President Trump's Genesis Mission is launching a new golden age of American discovery," Huang said. "With a $1 billion investment, NVIDIA is putting advanced Super Intelligence in the hands of America's scientists to accelerate breakthroughs in medicine, energy and materials."
Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are a more complicated example because Meta’s embrace of the word "superintelligence" predates Trump's executive order.
Meta has explicitly made "personal superintelligence" central to its vision for the future. In a July 2025 announcement, Zuckerberg said that "developing superintelligence is now in sight,” declaring that Meta's vision was “to bring personal superintelligence to everyone."
In a separate statement published in August 2026, Zuckerberg said that within the next few years people would be able to use "superintelligence beyond human capacity," and framed who gets access to it and what it will be used for as one of the major questions facing the industry.
Although Zuckerberg clearly believes in the term superintelligence, he didn’t change Meta’s terminology because of Trump's rebrand. Rather, the president adopted language already in Meta's strategy.
Elon Musk and SpaceX
Elon Musk has been among the most enthusiastic adopters of Trump's terminology, saying that SpaceXAI would be renamed "SpaceXSI." After posting "No more AI" and saying "SI" was "better," Musk was asked by a user on X whether that meant renaming the business to SpaceXSI. He responded: "Yes, we will make that change."
Musk also said in a separate post that "SpaceX is a super intelligence company."
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Mark Benioff and Salesforce
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has also embraced Trump's rebrand, taking steps to actually incorporate it into a product name. Benioff announced that the company's AIForce agent platform would become "SIForce," writing on X: "The era of Super Intelligence is here. AIForce is officially SIForce."
Satya Nadella and Microsoft
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has also begun using Trump's preferred terminology, although unlike Musk and Benioff, he hasn’t announced a corresponding Microsoft product or company rebrand.
In a recent post on X, titled "Models as Insider Risks in the Super Intelligence Era," Nadella repeatedly referred to "Super Intelligence" while arguing that advanced systems need stronger safeguards.
"The most trustworthy Super Intelligence system will not be the one with the model we trust most," he wrote. "It will be the one that enables us to trust the model the least." He also called for an "emergency brake" that would let an authorized person pause or shut down a model mid-task.
Tech Leaders That Haven't Followed Suit
The picture is less clear among other executives who attended Trump's September meeting.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei, OpenAI President and co-founder Greg Brockman, Musk, Zuckerberg and Huang all signed the "White House Accord on Super Intelligence," a voluntary agreement establishing safety controls for frontier systems.
Signing the accord, which carries the White House's "Super Intelligence" title, however, isn’t the same as renaming their companies' technology.
For example, despite signing the accord, Anthropic has continued to use the term "AI" in its communications. In an October 2 announcement, published after Trump's rebranding order, the company referred to an "enterprise AI talent gap," said companies were racing to bring "AI" into their organizations and described itself as an "AI company."
More recently, in a 2026 Usage Policy update published last week on October 8, it says, “Our September threat intelligence report documented the growing use of AI to build surveillance systems that identify and track political dissidents.”
Amazon Web Services, meanwhile, continues to maintain an "Artificial Intelligence" section on its News Blog, and describes artificial superintelligence as “a theoretical concept in AI research.”
Newsweek has reached out to Anthropic, Salesforce, and Nvidia for comment.
Republicans Start Using 'SI'
Some Republican politicians have adopted Trump's terminology more explicitly.
House Speaker Mike Johnson described the executives who met Trump as "super intelligence industry leaders" in an official September 29 statement and praised the meeting as potentially "one of the most historic" ever held at the White House.
Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa subsequently used "Super Intelligence (SI)" in an official statement, although her office clarified it as technology "also known as artificial intelligence." She called super intelligence "a powerful tool" and said Congress needed guardrails while continuing to advance the technology.
Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio has gone further. In an October 5 letter to Anthropic’s Amodei, Moreno described Anthropic's signing of the White House Accord on Super Intelligence as a “notable first step” and praised Trump's “unwavering commitment to American dominance in responsible SI development.”
Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Ben Kelly and Sam Wilson.