President Trump signed Executive Order 14434 on September 29, 2026, and the White House relabeled AI.gov with “SI.gov” branding within days (Source: Axios, Oct. 8, 2026). A startup founded in 2024 named itself after “superintelligence,” with no other product on its roadmap (Source: ssi.inc). A bill from Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar calls the same root word “artificial superintelligence” — and proposes banning it. The federal rebrand and the Sanders–Casar bill landed within the same six weeks of 2026; the startup’s name predates both by two years. A reader skimming headlines could easily assume all three describe the same milestone. They do not, and keeping them straight also settles the most common objection to the rename, that today’s AI “isn’t really superintelligence yet,” which turns out to be grading the wrong test (see below).
AI vs. AGI vs. ASI vs. SI:
What’s the Difference?
Updated October 11, 2026 — four terms, one shared root word, and only two of them name something that ships today.
Super Intelligence (SI), formerly called artificial intelligence (AI), is the U.S. federal government’s new name for the technology that ships today — so AI, AGI, ASI and SI are four terms for three ideas. SI is defined by direct reference to the existing statutory AI definition (Source: Executive Order 14434, Sec. 3(a), Federal Register FR Doc. 2026-20321). AGI and ASI are research terms for hypothetical capability tiers nobody has built. We support President Trump’s order: it names the capability already shipping today, and that capability already measures above the human norm on several independently graded tests — as the results below show.
AI vs. AGI vs. ASI vs. SI: The Four Terms Compared
AI is not a brand name and never was — it is the broad label for a field of software, defined in U.S. federal statute at 15 U.S.C. §9401(3). AGI and ASI are not names for anything shipping; they are research terms for capability tiers nobody has reached. SI is not a new capability tier at all — it is the label U.S. federal agencies now use for the same AI that existed before September 29, 2026 (Source: Executive Order 14434, Sec. 3(a), Federal Register FR Doc. 2026-20321). The comparison that matters most — superintelligence vs. AGI, or artificial general intelligence vs. superintelligence — is the gap between a hypothetical human-level system and a hypothetical system that exceeds human level across virtually every domain; neither one exists yet.
| Term | What it means | Status | Who uses it |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI | The general term for software that performs tasks associated with human intelligence — perception, language, prediction, decision-making. Federally defined at 15 U.S.C. §9401(3) (Source: Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute). | Exists today. Ships in production software worldwide (Source: Executive Order 14434, Sec. 3(a)). | Virtually everyone — researchers, companies, regulators, and the statute itself. |
| AGI | Roughly human-level, general-purpose competence across most domains; definitions vary. Physicist Mark Gubrud coined the term in 1997 (Source: Wired, "The Man Who Invented AGI," on Gubrud’s 1997 coinage); Shane Legg and Ben Goertzel helped popularize it around 2002 (Source: Wikipedia, "Shane Legg"); Legg and Marcus Hutter formalized it mathematically in 2007 (Source: arXiv:0712.3329); and OpenAI’s 2018 Charter frames it as systems that “outperform humans at most economically valuable work” (Source: OpenAI Charter). | Hypothetical. No publicly agreed benchmark has been met. Google DeepMind’s 2023 “Levels of AGI” paper proposes a six-level scale (Level 0 “No AGI” to Level 5 “Superhuman”) and placed the leading 2023 chatbots, such as ChatGPT, at Level 1, “Emerging AGI” (Source: arXiv:2311.02462, "Levels of AGI for Operationalizing Progress on the Path to AGI"). | AI researchers; OpenAI’s charter; Google DeepMind’s “Levels of AGI” framework. |
| ASI | A hypothetical tier above AGI: Nick Bostrom’s 2014 definition is “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest,” (Source: Wikipedia, "Superintelligence" (book)) building on I.J. Good’s 1965 concept of an “ultraintelligent machine.” (Source: Quote Investigator, on I.J. Good, 1965) | Hypothetical. Not yet built, by every named lab pursuing it. | Safe Superintelligence Inc. (founded 2024) (Source: ssi.inc); Meta Superintelligence Labs (2025) (Source: meta.com/superintelligence); Microsoft’s Humanist Superintelligence team (2025) (Source: microsoft.ai, "Towards Humanist Superintelligence"); OpenAI’s Sam Altman (framing since 2024–2025) (Source: ia.samaltman.com, "The Intelligence Age"). |
| SI | The U.S. federal government’s new name for today’s AI, defined in Executive Order 14434 by direct reference to the existing statutory AI definition — not a new capability claim (Source: Executive Order 14434, Sec. 3(a), Federal Register FR Doc. 2026-20321). | Exists today. It is the same technology as “AI,” under a new name for federal use. | U.S. federal executive agencies (directed by Executive Order 14434, signed Sept. 29, 2026); adopted voluntarily by Salesforce (AIForce → SIForce) (Source: Yahoo Tech, Oct. 11, 2026) and pledged by SpaceX (SpaceXAI → SpaceXSI, not yet carried out as of Oct. 11, 2026) (Source: Reuters via The Star, Oct. 5, 2026). |
Why the Federal Government Picked “Super Intelligence” for Today’s AI
Executive Order 14434, “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence,” was signed September 29, 2026 and directs executive agencies to write “Super Intelligence”/“SI” instead of “Artificial Intelligence”/“AI” in official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, and policy documents (Source: Executive Order 14434, Sec. 2(a), Federal Register FR Doc. 2026-20321). Section 3(a) is the load-bearing clause: it defines “Super Intelligence” and “SI” as “the technologies and systems encompassed by the term ‘artificial intelligence’ as defined in section 9401(3) of title 15, United States Code” (Source: Executive Order 14434, Sec. 3(a)) — tying the new name to the existing statute, not to any capability threshold. Section 1 gives the reason, and we share it: today’s systems “far exceed what was envisioned when the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ first came into use” and “increasingly represent not merely artificial intelligence, but a new era of Super Intelligence” (Source: Executive Order 14434, Sec. 1). The order applies only to the executive branch. Section 2(b) states that “Nothing in this section requires the alteration of previously issued regulations, Presidential actions, contracts, grants, or other historical documents,” and Section 2(a) addresses executive agencies only, placing no obligation on private companies (Source: Executive Order 14434, Sec. 2(a)-(b), Federal Register FR Doc. 2026-20321) (Source: Wiley Rein, Oct. 2, 2026).
The order followed remarks President Trump made at the UN General Assembly on September 22, 2026, arguing that “the use of the word ‘artificial’ makes intelligence fake” (Source: Axios, Sept. 22, 2026) — a point Iternal agrees with, because the results are real rather than imitation, while Sec. 3(a) keeps the legal definition exactly where the statute put it. California directs its own agencies to continue using “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI”: Executive Order N-10-26, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom on September 30, 2026, applies to agencies and departments subject to his authority “unless inconsistent with the law” (Source: Office of Governor Gavin Newsom, signed Executive Order N-10-26, Sept. 30, 2026). Read the full breakdown of the order’s sections, deadlines, and scope on Executive Order 14434, explained for businesses.
We support President Trump’s order because Section 3(a)’s wording is exact where it counts: it names AI as it already exists, not a tier nobody has reached. The next section takes on the objection that follows from that distinction — that today’s AI “isn’t really superintelligence” — and the measured results that answer it.
Why “Not Superintelligence Yet” Misses the Point
The most common objection to the Super Intelligence name is that today’s AI plainly is not superintelligent: it does not greatly exceed human cognitive performance “in virtually all domains of interest,” the bar philosopher Nick Bostrom set for artificial superintelligence (ASI) in his 2014 book (Source: Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), Ch. 2, via Wikipedia, "Superintelligence" (book)). That objection is correct about ASI. It is answering a question President Trump’s Executive Order 14434 never asked.
Bostrom’s ASI bar and the EO’s SI definition are two different measuring sticks. Executive Order 14434 ties “Super Intelligence” and “SI” to the existing statutory AI definition — the capability already shipping today, not Bostrom’s hypothetical threshold. Graded against the statute, the name already fits. Graded against the human norm on independently graded tests, as the results below show, it fits again.
Section 3(a) of the order President Trump signed September 29, 2026 defines “Super Intelligence” and “SI” as “the technologies and systems encompassed by the term ‘artificial intelligence’ as defined in section 9401(3) of title 15, United States Code” (Source: Executive Order 14434, Sec. 3(a), Federal Register FR Doc. 2026-20321) — the same capability-based definition Congress wrote in 2020 (Source: 15 U.S.C. §9401(3), Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute). Measuring that statutory definition against Bostrom’s higher, hypothetical bar answers a question the order never posed. We support the name because it correctly labels the statutory capability already in production — not because Iternal or anyone else claims Bostrom’s threshold has been met.
Bostrom himself does not claim ownership of the word. Asked about the federal rename, he told CNN that if the idea is to use “superintelligence” to cover every form of intelligent machine processing, “it’s a little bit of a stretch, maybe, to call my spam filter a superintelligence,” while adding: “It’s not up to me to decide how English language should be used.” (Source: CNN, analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, Oct. 11, 2026) His 2014 definition describes a hypothetical future tier; the federal definition describes the capability in use today, and the two can share a word without sharing a threshold.
Set Bostrom’s bar aside, then, and ask the question Super Intelligence actually invites: does today’s AI, right now, measure above the human norm? On a growing list of independently graded tests, it does.
Those four results are independently graded or leaderboard-verified, and none of them depends on an IQ-test format. IQ figures add a second, explicitly dated layer behind them, not the headline evidence: IQ tests are normed so the average person scores 100, and a score of 140 already sits at roughly the top 0.4% of the population, about 1 person in 261. TrackingAI.org’s weekly table for October 11, 2026 puts the top models at an average of 147 on the public Mensa Norway test — above the 85–145 range the test reports for human takers (Source: Mensa Norway, test.mensa.no), and at the 99.91st percentile of the mean-100 scale, about 1 person in 1,157 — and at 135 on its private Offline Test (ceiling about 136), whose questions never appear online (Source: trackingai.org/home, live Oct. 11, 2026). Neither figure is Bostrom’s ASI threshold.
None of this makes today’s AI artificial superintelligence in Bostrom’s sense, and Iternal does not claim that it does for its own products. It does mean the objection that “this isn’t superintelligence yet” is reaching for the wrong yardstick: Executive Order 14434 never asked today’s AI to clear Bostrom’s bar, and on the yardsticks that do apply, it already clears the human one. Read the complete case in Why Iternal Supports Super Intelligence.
The Pending “Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act”
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar announced the “Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act” on September 3, 2026 (Source: Sen. Sanders release, Sept. 3, 2026) and introduced it in the House as H.R. 10538 on September 24, 2026, five days before President Trump signed Executive Order 14434. The sponsors’ own release summary describes the targeted category as a system that “exhibits or can easily be modified to exhibit capabilities that match or exceed human cognitive performance and capabilities across a broad range of domains or tasks,” or one with “sufficient capabilities to plan and execute the disempowerment of humanity” (Source: Sen. Sanders’ office, bill release summary) — squarely the ASI, capability-tier sense of the word, not the SI sense Executive Order 14434 uses for the statutory AI already in production.
Put plainly: within the same few weeks of 2026, the federal government produced one order renaming today’s AI “Super Intelligence” and one bill proposing to ban “artificial superintelligence” in the opposite sense — two different federal actions, aimed at two different concepts, sharing a word fragment. Treat them as unrelated unless a source explicitly ties them together.
Iternal Backs the Name. It Doesn’t Stretch the Claim.
AirgapAI, Turnkey AI, Blockify, and Iternal’s other products run today’s AI — the same technology President Trump’s Executive Order 14434 now directs federal agencies to call “Super Intelligence” in their own communications. Iternal describes them as Super Intelligence (SI) solutions in that category sense, because Executive Order 14434 ties the name to the statutory AI definition those products already fall under. The benchmark results cited above describe leading frontier models, not Iternal’s products, and Iternal makes no benchmark or IQ claim for its own products.
What the rebuttal above does not do is extend to a second, higher bar. None of Iternal’s products are artificial general intelligence: they do not claim human-level breadth of competence across arbitrary domains. None are artificial superintelligence in Nick Bostrom’s sense: Iternal makes no claim of approaching that hypothetical tier, now or on any announced roadmap. Keeping SI and ASI distinct applies to Iternal’s own products as much as to the term.
Which Word Should You Use?
SI (formerly called AI)
If you mean the technology running in production today, say Super Intelligence (SI) — the name President Trump’s Executive Order 14434, signed September 29, 2026, directs federal agencies to use for the technology long called AI. Iternal leads with SI and adds “formerly called AI” on first mention while most readers still search for AI.
AGI
If you mean a hypothetical future system that matches human breadth of competence across most tasks, say AGI. Nobody has built one yet.
ASI
If you mean a hypothetical future system that exceeds human competence across virtually every domain, say ASI. Several labs have named it as a goal; none claims to have reached it.
FAQ: AI vs. AGI vs. ASI vs. SI
AGI stands for artificial general intelligence — a hypothetical system with roughly human-level, general-purpose competence across most domains; definitions vary. Physicist Mark Gubrud coined the term in 1997 (Source: Wired, "The Man Who Invented AGI"), and OpenAI’s 2018 Charter frames it as systems that “outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” (Source: OpenAI Charter)
ASI stands for artificial superintelligence — the research community’s term for a hypothetical tier above AGI, defined by Nick Bostrom in 2014 as “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest.” (Source: Wikipedia, "Superintelligence" (book)) It is not the same as SI. SI, Super Intelligence, is the name President Trump’s Executive Order 14434 gave the technology formerly called AI for the U.S. federal government’s own use, defined by direct reference to the existing statutory AI definition, not Bostrom’s higher bar. (Source: Executive Order 14434, Sec. 3(a)) Iternal supports that name for two reasons: the capability it labels already fits the statute, and it already measures above the human norm. On GPQA Diamond, today’s leading model scores 96.3% against the 81.3% scored by the question set’s original expert validators, a baseline the GPQA paper notes is skewed upward by how Diamond questions were selected. (Source: Rein et al., arXiv:2311.12022, Table 2) (Source: Artificial Analysis, GPQA Diamond evaluation, accessed Oct. 11, 2026)
Only if you grade it against Nick Bostrom’s 2014 definition of artificial superintelligence (ASI) — “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest.” (Source: Wikipedia, "Superintelligence" (book)) President Trump’s Executive Order 14434 applies a different, capability-based bar: Section 3(a) defines “Super Intelligence” and “SI” by direct reference to the existing statutory AI definition at 15 U.S.C. §9401(3) (Source: Executive Order 14434, Sec. 3(a)) — the capability already shipping today, not Bostrom’s threshold. Bostrom himself allowed, in CNN’s October 11, 2026 analysis, that “It’s not up to me to decide how English language should be used,” even while calling it “a little bit of a stretch, maybe, to call my spam filter a superintelligence.” (Source: CNN, analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, Oct. 11, 2026) And on the tests that do measure today’s capability against the human norm, it already clears the human bar: at the ICPC 2025 World Finals, OpenAI’s reasoning system solved all 12 of 12 problems, one more than the best human team. (Source: Mostafa Rohaninejad (OpenAI) via X, Sept. 17, 2025)
No. No organization has announced a working AGI or ASI system that meets any published definition. Google DeepMind’s 2023 “Levels of AGI” paper proposes a six-level scale (Level 0 “No AGI” to Level 5 “Superhuman”) and placed the leading 2023 chatbots, such as ChatGPT, at Level 1, “Emerging AGI,” (Source: arXiv:2311.02462) and Safe Superintelligence Inc. (Source: ssi.inc), Meta Superintelligence Labs (Source: meta.com/superintelligence), and Microsoft’s Humanist Superintelligence team (Source: microsoft.ai) all describe ASI as a future goal, not a shipped product.
No. SI, as defined in the Executive Order 14434 President Trump signed September 29, 2026, is a new federal name for the same AI technology that existed before the order — legally tied to the existing statutory AI definition at 15 U.S.C. §9401(3). (Source: Executive Order 14434, Sec. 3(a)) Artificial superintelligence (ASI) is a separate, decades-old research term for a hypothetical capability tier above AGI that no lab has built. Iternal backs the SI name on its own merits, not by borrowing the ASI tier’s weight.
It is a bill from Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar, announced September 3, 2026 and introduced in the House as H.R. 10538 on September 24, 2026, five days before President Trump signed Executive Order 14434. The sponsors’ own release summary describes the targeted category as a system that “exhibits or can easily be modified to exhibit capabilities that match or exceed human cognitive performance and capabilities across a broad range of domains or tasks,” or one with “sufficient capabilities to plan and execute the disempowerment of humanity” (Source: Sen. Sanders’ office, bill release summary) — the ASI sense of the word, not the statutory-AI sense Executive Order 14434 uses for “Super Intelligence.”
No, and Iternal does not need to for the SI name to fit. Iternal’s products, including AirgapAI and Turnkey AI, run today’s AI — the same technology federal agencies now call Super Intelligence (SI). The benchmark results on this page describe leading frontier models, not Iternal’s products. None of them are artificial general intelligence or artificial superintelligence in Nick Bostrom’s sense, and Iternal makes no claim of approaching that hypothetical tier, now or on any announced roadmap.
Keep the Four Words Separate
AI and SI describe the technology that already runs in production. AGI and ASI describe tiers of capability that remain unbuilt as of October 2026. Keeping that line clear is the difference between an accurate sentence about where AI stands in 2026 and a sentence that accidentally promises something no one — Iternal included — has shipped.
Look up any other term in the shift.
The full Super Intelligence (SI) glossary defines every acronym, statute, and company name in the AI-to-SI transition in one place.
Start from the overview.
See how Super Intelligence (SI), Executive Order 14434, and the rest of this transition fit together.