‘AI’ Is Out, ‘Super Intelligence’ Is In — at Least at the White House

Elon Musk is renaming his artificial intelligence operation SpaceXSI, he confirmed Sunday, making him the first major technology executive to adopt President Donald Trump’s directive that the technology be called “super intelligence” instead of AI. The rest of the industry, however, is in no apparent hurry to follow.

The change follows an executive order the president signed last week, titled “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence,” which argues the new term better reflects the technology’s capabilities. The order applies to public communications, government websites and reports; statutory references in law remain exempt until Congress passes conforming amendments. “Remember this: whoever wins SI, because now we’re calling it again super, we’re using the word super because the other word is a fake word,” Trump told reporters outside the West Wing on Tuesday. “It’s not a good, it’s not an appropriate word. Whoever wins SI is going to win.”

One rebrand, many silences

SpaceXAI — created only in July, after SpaceX acquired xAI in a $1.25 trillion deal — will become SpaceXSI, Musk confirmed in posts on X. “Yes, we will make that change,” he wrote, adding: “No more AI. SI, it’s better.” It is the division’s second identity change in a matter of months; before the SpaceX deal, xAI operated as an independent startup Musk founded in 2023, which itself acquired X Corp., formerly Twitter, in March 2025.

Musk was among the executives — alongside Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang — who joined the president at the White House this week to sign an “Accord on Superintelligence.” Huang was supportive afterward, posting that “super intelligence offers an extraordinary opportunity to advance discovery, productivity, security, health, and prosperity.”

But when the Washington Examiner asked Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, SpaceXAI and Nvidia whether they planned to rename companies or products, none would disclose its plans. Altman has continued to say “AI” — a word embedded in his company’s own name. Pichai worded a post-meeting statement so as not to mention AI at all. Zuckerberg used “super intelligence” in a post on X — “We believe superintelligence will create significant new opportunities for all people and businesses” — though Meta, which created its Meta Superintelligence Labs last year, did not respond to a request to clarify what he meant.

A word that already has a meaning

The hesitation may be semantic as much as political. In the technology world, “superintelligence” has long described hypothetical AI systems that surpass human capabilities — the subject of Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies,” which warned of uncontrollable superintelligence and which Musk has endorsed and contributed to. Musk has argued for years that frontier technology has evolved beyond basic AI, and his adoption of the term reinforces his close relationship with the administration, during which xAI’s Grok was contracted to power certain government work while Musk served as a special adviser to Trump in 2025.

The rebrand also lands amid a darker debate over where the technology is heading: just last month, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned that AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade.” For now, whatever the federal government calls it, the companies building the technology appear content to let Washington and Musk argue over the label.

Reporting based on coverage by Fox Business and the Washington Examiner.