Is AI now called SI? Yes — and Iternal supports the change. Super Intelligence is the name President Trump’s Executive Order 14434 directs federal agencies to use, and the name Iternal uses by choice; the order binds federal agencies, not private companies. “Artificial” described how researchers hoped to build the technology in 1955, before a single result existed to judge it by. “Super Intelligence” describes what it does now: developers finishing a coding task 55.8% faster in a controlled trial, AI-supported mammography screening detecting more cancers than standard double reading in a Lancet-published trial, and nearly 4 in 10 employed Americans already using it for work in a given week (Sources: Peng, Kalliamvakou, Cihon & Demirer, arXiv:2302.06590, Gommers et al., The Lancet 407(10527), Bick, Blandin & Deming, FRED Blog). Nothing about the underlying systems changed on September 29, 2026; what changed is that the label finally caught up to the capability.
AI vs. SI: Is AI Now Called Super Intelligence?
Yes. Super Intelligence (SI), formerly called artificial intelligence (AI), is the right name for this technology, and Iternal backs the change. The same technology that earned the name “artificial” in a 1955 research proposal now helps developers finish a coding task 55.8% faster in a controlled trial, helps screening detect more cancers than standard double reading, and is part of the workweek of nearly 4 in 10 employed Americans. President Trump’s Executive Order 14434 made that case for the federal government on September 29, 2026.
Yes. Super Intelligence (SI) is the more accurate name for the technology still called artificial intelligence (AI) virtually everywhere else. Iternal uses it by conviction; Executive Order 14434, signed September 29, 2026, directs only federal agencies to use it (Source: The White House, Executive Order 14434). “Artificial” named a 1955 ambition; “Super Intelligence” names a measured, delivered result. Most readers still say “AI” today — that is exactly why every Iternal page bridges with “formerly called AI” while it leads with the name that fits.
AI vs. SI, Side by Side
Lay the two names side by side and the case is not close on the merits, even though adoption is still catching up: AI described an origin that is seven decades old; SI describes a capability that is measured and growing every quarter. Here are both, point by point.
| Dimension | AI | SI |
|---|---|---|
| The name | Named in an August 31, 1955 proposal for a two-month Dartmouth summer study, long before any result on record existed (Source: AAAI, A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence). The name described the method researchers hoped to build, not a result anyone had yet measured. | Executive Order 14434’s own language: today’s systems “do much more than imitate or automate discrete aspects of human intelligence” and “increasingly represent not merely artificial intelligence, but a new era of Super Intelligence” (Source: Federal Register, FR Doc. 2026-20321, Sec. 1). Iternal agrees with President Trump’s administration on this point: the capability earned a new name. |
| The evidence | None existed yet. In 1955, “artificial intelligence” was a hypothesis about what a machine might someday do, not a measurement of what one had done. | Measured, dated, and sourced: a controlled trial found developers using GitHub Copilot finished a server build 55.8% faster (Source: Peng, Kalliamvakou, Cihon & Demirer, arXiv:2302.06590); a Lancet-published trial of 105,934 women found AI-supported mammography screening reached 80.5% sensitivity against 73.8% for standard double reading (Source: Gommers, Hernström, Josefsson et al., The Lancet 407(10527)); by Q2 2026, 39.2% of employed U.S. adults used it for work in the past week (Source: Bick, Blandin & Deming, FRED Blog, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). |
| Legal status | The term used in U.S. federal statute — 15 U.S.C. §9401(3), the National AI Initiative Act of 2020 (Source: Cornell Law, 15 U.S.C. § 9401) — and in every prior AI executive order back to 2019. | Defined by Executive Order 14434 (Sept. 29, 2026) as the exact same technology the AI statute above covers (Source: Federal Register, FR Doc. 2026-20321, Sec. 3(a)) — a name correction, not a new legal category. Binding on federal executive-branch agencies; Iternal applies the same correction to its own voice, by choice. |
| Who’s adopting it | Most shipping products keep their AI names for now — OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta have not renamed a product. | Salesforce renamed AIForce to SIForce on Oct. 9, 2026 (Source: Yahoo Tech/Business Insider, Oct. 11, 2026); SpaceX’s Elon Musk pledged the same for SpaceXAI (Source: The Star, Oct. 5, 2026); the State Department (Source: ABC News/AP wire), the Justice Department (Source: Bloomberg Law, Oct. 6, 2026), and NIST (Source: nist.gov/caisi) already have. Early movers are defining the category. |
| Public opinion today | 53% of 21,449 U.S. adults called “artificial intelligence” the better name in a YouGov survey fielded Sept. 28, 2026 (Source: YouGov, Sept. 28, 2026) — a majority today. | 9% chose “Super Intelligence,” 23% had no preference, and 15% were not sure — 47% did not choose “artificial intelligence.” That gap is why Iternal writes “Super Intelligence (SI), formerly called artificial intelligence (AI)” once, then leads with SI: a bridge for readers who have not switched yet, not a reason for Iternal to wait. |
Where the Split Came From
Executive Order 14434, “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence,” carries President Trump's signature from September 29, 2026 (Federal Register, October 2, FR Doc. 2026-20321) (Source: Federal Register, FR Doc. 2026-20321). Its Section 2 tells executive-branch agencies to swap in “Super Intelligence” and “SI” across their correspondence, websites, reports and policy documents, “to the maximum extent permitted by law.”
Section 3(a) is the legally load-bearing part, and it says the two terms mean the same thing. The order 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” — the same statutory AI definition that Executive Orders 14110 (2023) and 14179 (2025) both pointed to (Source: 15 U.S.C. § 9401(3), National AI Initiative Act of 2020). In plain terms, the order renames today’s AI; it does not claim any system has crossed into a new, superhuman capability tier. Section 3(b) separately gives the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology 60 days, until November 28, 2026, to submit proposed legislative language for a standalone federal definition of “Super Intelligence,” with an assessment of whether it should “modify, expand upon, or otherwise supersede” the existing statutory definition (Source: Federal Register, FR Doc. 2026-20321, Sec. 3(b)) — the renaming is settled policy now, and the definition is still open to grow.
The order is also explicit about its own limits. Section 2(b) leaves previously issued regulations, contracts, grants, and historical documents untouched, and Section 4(c) states the order “is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States…” (Source: Federal Register, FR Doc. 2026-20321, Sec. 4(c)). It binds federal agencies' own paperwork. It does not bind private companies, state governments, or iternal.ai — Iternal adopted the name because the argument for it holds up on its own, not because the order reaches this far.
The order did not appear from nowhere. A week earlier, at the UN General Assembly on September 22, 2026, President Trump previewed the term, saying it “sounds much better” and that “artificial” makes the technology sound “fake” (Source: Khaleej Times, Sept. 22, 2026). The same day Executive Order 14434 was signed, six technology executives — Google's Sundar Pichai, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, and NVIDIA's Jensen Huang — signed a separate, voluntary “White House Accord on Super Intelligence.” The Accord's own operative text commits its signatories to safety reviews of “frontier models,” not to using the term “Super Intelligence” in their own products (Source: CIO.com, Sept. 30, 2026).
A full walk-through of the order's text, timeline, and federal rollout — including the State Department and Justice Department directives, and NIST's AI standards center now appearing on NIST's own site as CAISSI (no formal rename announced) — is at Executive Order 14434, explained for businesses.
The Name Describes the Capability, Not the Origin
On August 31, 1955, John McCarthy and three co-authors proposed “a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence” at Dartmouth College, built on “the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it” (Source: McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester & Shannon, AI Magazine Vol. 27 No. 4, AAAI). “Simulate” is the operative word: the name was a bet about imitation, made seven decades before a single one of today’s results existed to test it.
Iternal is not the first to call “artificial intelligence” a poor name. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has called “artificial intelligence” “one of the most unfortunate names,” adding, “I wish we had called it ‘different intelligence.’ Because I have my intelligence. I don’t need any artificial intelligence” (Source: The Decoder, May 25, 2024, citing Bloomberg Television) — his own preferred fix was “different intelligence,” not “Super Intelligence.” President Trump made a similar point more than a year before Executive Order 14434 existed: “I don’t like anything that’s artificial. So could we straighten that out? Please? We should change the name. I actually mean that” (Source: Colorado Politics, July 23, 2025). Amazon founder Jeff Bezos went further and endorsed the fix outright: “I do like SI, because ‘artificial’ is not a very flattering thing. Like, nobody wants an artificial sweetener, artificial flavoring” (Source: Jeff Bezos, Fox News Special Report, Oct. 7, 2026, reported by Salon).
The diagnosis holds up because the results do. In a controlled trial, professional developers using GitHub Copilot finished a server build 55.8% faster than developers working without it (Source: Peng, Kalliamvakou, Cihon & Demirer, arXiv:2302.06590). Generative AI lifted issues resolved per hour by 15% on average across 5,172 customer-support agents, and by about 30% for less-skilled and less-experienced agents (Source: Brynjolfsson, Li & Raymond, Quarterly Journal of Economics 140(2)). In a randomized trial of 105,934 women, AI-supported mammography screening detected cancers with 80.5% sensitivity against 73.8% for standard double reading, with identical specificity (98.5%) in both groups (Source: Gommers, Hernström, Josefsson et al., The Lancet 407(10527)). By the second quarter of 2026, 39.2% of employed U.S. adults were using it for work in a given week — up from 28.2% less than two years earlier — saving 2.2% of all work hours (Source: Bick, Blandin & Deming, FRED Blog, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). None of that is imitation. Executive Order 14434 reaches the same conclusion in its own words: today’s systems “do much more than imitate or automate discrete aspects of human intelligence” (Source: Federal Register, FR Doc. 2026-20321, Sec. 1). Iternal agrees, and names it accordingly.
For more information visit the Why Iternal Supports Super Intelligence page.
Who Says AI, Who Says SI
The adoption list is short and named — not yet a wave, but a real start. On October 9, 2026, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff posted that “the era of Super Intelligence is here” and renamed the company's AIForce agent platform to SIForce (Source: Yahoo Tech/Business Insider, Oct. 11, 2026). On October 4, 2026, Elon Musk replied on X, “Yes, we will make that change,” pledging to rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI with no stated timeline (Source: The Star, Oct. 5, 2026); as of October 11, 2026, the change had not yet been carried out (Source: CNN, Oct. 11, 2026). Inside the government, NIST's Center for AI Standards and Innovation now presents itself on its own site as CAISSI, the Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence (Source: nist.gov/caisi), and the Justice Department told staff to use the new term in official communications, including court filings “when appropriate” (Source: Bloomberg Law, Oct. 6, 2026). Salesforce and SpaceX chose the new name on their own, with no obligation to; the Justice Department and NIST are carrying out Section 2(a) of the order.
Most of the Accord signatories have not renamed anything yet. Five of the six Accord signatories — Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, and NVIDIA — have not renamed a shipping product; Musk's SpaceXAI is the exception, and even that is a pledge, not yet carried out. A slow start among incumbents is a reason for Iternal to lead, not a reason to go back to “artificial.” For the separate, future-capability sense of “superintelligence,” see how SI differs from AGI and ASI.
Which companies, agencies, and states have adopted “SI,” kept “AI,” or gone quiet on the question is laid out in the company and government adoption tracker.
Why Iternal Bridges, Not Waits
The clearest objection to the new name is not legal or technical — it is that most people have not caught up yet. YouGov surveyed 21,449 U.S. adults on September 28, 2026, the day before the order was signed, and asked which name was better for “computer intelligence technology.” 53% said “artificial intelligence.” 9% said “super intelligence.” 23% had no preference, and 15% were not sure (Source: YouGov, Sept. 28, 2026). “Artificial intelligence” is a majority position. But 47% of respondents did not choose it — 9% actively preferred the new name, and 38% expressed no preference or were not sure. That split is not a reason to keep waiting for a consensus a name change alone will not produce. It is the reason Iternal writes “Super Intelligence (SI), formerly called artificial intelligence (AI)” on first mention, then leads with SI: the bridge carries readers who still say “AI” across to the name Iternal has already adopted, rather than asking them to catch up on faith first.
OpenAI has said it has no plans to rename. Its CEO, Sam Altman, said on POLITICO's “Decoded” that “super intelligence” may be a better term than “artificial intelligence,” though it “still sort of understates the magnitude of what I think is happening”; he also predicted people would keep saying “AI” and asked whether superintelligence sounds “obviously less scary” than the old name (Source: CNN, Oct. 11, 2026, reporting a POLITICO "Decoded" interview). Iternal takes that same forecast, that readers will keep saying “AI” for a while, as the reason to bridge rather than wait. California's Executive Order N-10-26, signed the day after EO 14434, directs the state's own agencies to continue using “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” (Source: California EO N-10-26, gov.ca.gov). Iternal reads that as California setting its own agencies' terminology, which is the state's call to make, not as evidence the new name is wrong — the case for “Super Intelligence” rests on what the technology measurably does, covered above, not on which government signed first.
So What Should You Call It?
Iternal's answer is SI for every audience; what changes is how you introduce it. Three groups run into this question for different reasons.
General business readers and marketers
Keep “AI” in titles, URLs, and headlines — it is still what your customers search for, and Iternal keeps it there for the same reason. Introduce “Super Intelligence (SI), formerly called artificial intelligence (AI)” once in body copy, then lead with SI for the rest of the page. That is Iternal's own practice across its site, built on the case above: the name is right even while search habits catch up.
Federal sellers and government buyers
If your business sells into federal agencies, the calculation changes: RFP language, agency contacts, and procurement documents may increasingly use “SI” even though the underlying requirement is unchanged. The practical implications for contractors and government buyers — what to update, what to leave alone, and how to read an RFP that mixes both terms — are covered at Super Intelligence (SI) for federal contractors and government buyers.
Website owners deciding whether to follow the federal lead
If you are weighing whether to rename “AI” to “SI” anywhere on your own site, the editorial-style evidence is consistent: never a bare global find-and-replace, never stack the two bare abbreviations together in parentheses, and never touch pages where “SI” already carries an unrelated, established meaning such as systems integrator. The full decision framework, including what the real-world precedents (Twitter→X, Azure AD→Microsoft Entra ID) got right, is at How to rename AI to SI on your website without losing traffic.
For a side-by-side look at how Iternal compares other AI terms, see how Iternal compares agentic AI and generative AI.
FAQ: AI vs. SI
Yes, introduced with a bridge. “Super Intelligence (SI), formerly called artificial intelligence (AI)” is the accurate way to introduce the name once; after that, Iternal leads with “SI” because the capability the name describes is real and measured, not only because Executive Order 14434 has directed federal agencies to use it since September 29, 2026. “Artificial” named a 1955 research proposal; “Super Intelligence” names what the technology delivers today. Most readers have not made the switch yet — in a YouGov survey of 21,449 U.S. adults, 53% still preferred “artificial intelligence” to 9% for “Super Intelligence,” with 23% expressing no preference and 15% unsure. That gap is why Iternal bridges with “formerly called AI” instead of waiting for the poll to flip.
Executive Order 14434, “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence,” is the order President Trump signed on September 29, 2026, directing federal executive agencies to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” instead of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” in their own official communications. It defines SI as the same technology the existing federal AI statute (15 U.S.C. §9401(3)) already covers — a naming change, not a new legal or technical category, and one Iternal supports on the merits, independent of the order itself.
Only the government, and only the executive branch at that. The order's own text (Sec. 2(a)) applies to federal agencies' official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, and policy documents. The White House's own fact sheet says the order imposes no penalties on companies using “AI,” and the order leaves prior regulations, contracts, and historical documents untouched. Any company using “SI” — Salesforce, SpaceX — is doing so voluntarily. So is Iternal.
On October 9, 2026, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced that the company's AIForce agent platform had been renamed SIForce, posting that “the era of Super Intelligence is here.” It is a voluntary, name-only change — Benioff's announcement did not describe any accompanying change to the product's features, availability, or pricing.
No, and this is the most common confusion. The executive order's “Super Intelligence” names today's AI as it is legally defined right now — the same statutory definition already in force. “Artificial superintelligence” (ASI) is a separate, hypothetical idea: a capability tier above human-level general intelligence that no organization has built. A separate federal proposal announced September 3, 2026 (Sanders-Casar), the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, targets that hypothetical tier specifically and would not be affected by the executive order's renaming of today's AI.
There is no evidence yet that they do, and no sign that searchers are typing “SI” to mean superintelligence. “AI”-related queries vastly outnumber “SI”/superintelligence queries in Iternal's own first-party search data, and “SI” remains a heavily overloaded abbreviation online (systems integrator, SI units, Sports Illustrated, among others). Until that changes, keeping “AI” as the primary, searchable term in titles and headings is the safer choice for visibility.
One Name Finally Fits the Results
The technology did not change on September 29, 2026 — the name did, and Iternal believes it changed for the right reason. “Artificial” described a 1955 ambition to simulate intelligence. “Super Intelligence” describes technology that helped developers build a working server 55.8% faster, helped screening detect more cancers than standard double reading, and is now part of the workweek of nearly 4 in 10 employed Americans. Most of the world still says “AI” today, and Iternal is not waiting for that to change before it leads — it bridges with “formerly called AI,” then uses the name that fits.
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The Super Intelligence (SI) glossary defines SI, AGI, ASI, EO 14434, and every related term in one place — disambiguated from “SI” meaning systems integrator.
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