Trump orders federal agencies to drop "AI" for "Super Intelligence," as Democrats push to ban it

The federal government will now refer to artificial intelligence as "Super Intelligence," under an executive order President Trump signed September 29. The move came six days after Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar introduced legislation that would do the opposite of celebrate the technology: ban the most advanced forms of it outright and create a new federal agency empowered to order dangerous systems destroyed.

The two actions, arriving within the same ten-day stretch, have put the executive branch and a faction of congressional Democrats on opposite ends of the same question — not how to regulate artificial intelligence, but what to call it and how far its development should be allowed to go.

What the order does

Executive Order 14434, "Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence," directs executive departments and agencies to use "Super Intelligence" and "SI" "in place of 'Artificial Intelligence' and 'AI' in official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents." The order does not require existing regulations, contracts or historical records to be rewritten, and it applies only to the extent permitted by existing statutory language.

Its stated rationale is that "the capabilities of today's frontier systems do much more than imitate or automate discrete aspects of human intelligence" and that they "amplify human ingenuity and unlock new forms of creativity" across science, medicine and other fields, according to the order's text. Trump previewed the change a week earlier at the United Nations General Assembly, telling delegates that the word "artificial" "makes intelligence sound fake."

The order gives the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology 60 days to propose federal legislative language formally defining "Super Intelligence" — in the meantime, the administration says the term covers the same systems already defined as "artificial intelligence" under existing law. The White House fact sheet ties the renaming to several earlier initiatives, including the "Genesis Mission," a more than $5 billion push to accelerate AI-driven breakthroughs in science and medicine; the 2025 "America's AI Action Plan"; and a "National Super Intelligence Policy Framework" released in March.

A bill to ban, not rename

Sanders and Casar's response, unveiled publicly on September 23, takes the opposite approach. Their Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act — introduced in the House by Casar as H.R. 10538, with nine original co-sponsors — would make it illegal for any person or company to develop or deploy "artificial superintelligence," which the bill defines 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, including by overthrowing or undermining the U.S. government."

The bill would pause development of advanced AI systems until a new federal regulator is operating with clear review rules in place, and it would establish a new cabinet-level agency — advised by an independent technical board — to monitor frontier AI systems throughout their development, supervise the removal of dangerous capabilities such as the ability to resist shutdown commands, and, if necessary, oversee the destruction of systems found to cross the line into superintelligence. Violations would carry what the bill's official summary calls a "corporate death penalty" for companies and up to 20 years in prison for individuals, a penalty range its sponsors compare to existing law on unlawfully developing nuclear weapons. The bill also directs U.S. foreign policy toward pursuing international agreements and export controls to prevent superintelligent AI from being developed anywhere.

"Do we really want to develop a super intelligence that when it becomes smarter than human beings could act independently of human control? I don't think we do," Sanders said in announcing the bill.

Reaction

The administration's terminology shift has drawn skepticism from researchers who study the field. Simon Coghlan, a digital ethics lecturer at the University of Melbourne, called the rebranding misleading, arguing it overstates what current systems can actually do. Henry Hoffmann, chair of computer science at the University of Chicago, noted that "superintelligence" already has an established meaning in AI-safety research — a hypothetical system that substantially exceeds human cognitive ability — and said the administration's usage risks collapsing that distinction into a marketing term.

Sanders was more direct about the president personally, saying Trump "has very little understanding of what this issue is about" and comparing the challenge of advanced AI to Cold War-era nuclear arms control, including the case for international cooperation with China rather than an unconstrained race. Trump has previously dismissed Democratic alarm over AI risk as a "hoax." The bill was unveiled publicly on September 23 with public endorsements from some employees at major AI labs, including researchers at OpenAI and Google DeepMind who have separately warned that frontier systems are advancing in ways their own developers do not fully understand. By most legislative counts, the bill faces long odds of passage in a Republican-controlled Congress that has so far favored looser federal AI oversight.

What happens next

The practical effects diverge sharply depending on which track prevails. Under the executive order, agencies are already expected to begin using the new terminology, and the administration's proposed statutory definition of "Super Intelligence" is due within 60 days — a document likely to shape how Congress and regulators describe the technology going forward regardless of what, if anything, happens to the Sanders-Casar bill. That bill has not been scheduled for a committee vote, and Republican leaders in both chambers have not signaled support for it. For now, the federal government is proceeding on two tracks at once: one encouraging the fastest possible development of the technology under a more ambitious name, the other seeking to outlaw the most advanced version of it before it exists.