The News
Executive Order 14434, signed September 29, tells the executive branch to say "Super Intelligence" and "SI" where it used to say "Artificial Intelligence" and "AI," per the White House. The order covers correspondence, websites, reports, and policy documents. It leaves existing regulations, contracts, and grants alone. It defines the new term by pointing at the old one: SI means whatever 15 U.S.C. 9401(3) already calls artificial intelligence.
The president's science adviser has 60 days, until about November 28, to send over draft legislation with a definition of its own. The order binds federal agencies. It asks nothing of private companies.
The View
I have sat through four of these. "E-business" became "the cloud." "Big data" became "machine learning," which became "AI" the week the budgets moved. Every rename arrived with a consultant and left with an invoice. This is the first one I can remember that came by executive order.
For the next few months there are two vocabularies. A federal program officer will write "SI" in an email about a grant whose terms say "AI." A solicitation will ask for "SI capabilities" under an acquisition rule that regulates "artificial intelligence." The order says the words mean the same thing, and for now they do, because the definition is a pointer to the old statute. Your contract is unaffected. Your compliance checklist is unaffected. Your search alerts are broken, because nobody set one for "SI."
The word they picked already had a job. In the research field, superintelligence means a system that outperforms people at nearly everything, and nobody credible claims we have one. I use these tools every day. They are good at drafts and bad at knowing when they are wrong. Calling a contract-review bot "Super Intelligence" in a federal report does to the phrase what "artisanal" did to bread. The cost shows up later, when a system that deserves the word arrives and finds it already assigned to a chatbot that renews fishing licenses.
Watch November 28. The order asks whether a statutory definition of Super Intelligence should modify, expand, or replace the existing definition of AI. A pointer changes nothing. A new definition changes scope. If the statute ends up defining SI more narrowly than AI, some systems fall out of rules written for AI. If it is broader, more fall in. State laws, agency rules, and procurement clauses that lean on the federal definition all move with it. That is where a rename turns into regulation, and it will be drafted in sixty days by an office that has other things to do.
There is a commercial angle and it is predictable. Vendors who sell to the government will have "SI" on their landing pages by Thanksgiving. I would hold off. Your commercial customers search for AI, your contracts say AI, and the state regulator who writes to you will say AI. Rename the federal sales deck if the contracting officer wants it. Leave the product alone.
Room for Disagreement
The order makes an argument, and it is a fair one. It says frontier systems now do more than imitate or automate pieces of human intelligence, so "artificial" undersells them. There is something to that. "Artificial intelligence" was coined in the 1950s, when the state of the art played checkers. Names drift. "Horsepower" outlived the horse. If the new term sticks, in five years this column will read like a man yelling at a font.
Notable
- The order creates no enforceable rights and applies "to the maximum extent permitted by law," which keeps every statute that says "artificial intelligence" as written.
- Privacy professionals are advising teams to map "SI" to "AI" in their inventories and keep definitions explicit in contracts, per the IAPP.
- The task force that shares the name is covered in What Is the Super Intelligence Force?
- The section-by-section version is in our explainer on the order.
Bottom Line
Use the government's word when you write to the government, and keep "AI" everywhere a contract, a statute, or a customer will read it. Put November 28 on the calendar. The definition that follows the rename carries the legal weight.
— Hank