On September 29, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order instructing every federal agency to stop saying "artificial intelligence" and start saying Super Intelligence instead. Six days later, he named four officials to run a new "Super Intelligence Force" built to carry that renamed technology into policy. In the same narrow window, a public statement organized by the Future of Life Institute — signed by people who agree on almost nothing else, from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to former Trump strategist Steve Bannon to Prince Harry — crossed roughly 76,000 signatures calling for the opposite: a prohibition on building the very thing the White House had just rebranded. Two documents, days apart, describing a technology nobody can agree how to even talk about.
The Order That Renamed AI
The executive order, titled "Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence" and tracked by law firms including Wiley and Freshfields as Executive Order 14434, does more than swap a word in press releases. It directs executive branch agencies to replace "Artificial Intelligence" and "AI" with "Super Intelligence" and "SI" across official communications, websites, reports, and other non-statutory materials going forward.
A Deadline Already on the Calendar
The order isn't purely symbolic. It also kicks off a review of the government's current statutory definition of AI and directs the administration's science and technology office to propose a new federal definition of "SI," with draft legislative language due by November 28, 2026 — 60 days after the order was signed. That date matters because it's the first real test of whether "Super Intelligence" becomes more than a branding exercise: Congress, not Trump, ultimately decides whether any statute actually adopts the new term.
Why the White House Wanted a New Word
The administration's own fact sheet makes the reasoning explicit: "The name Super Intelligence conveys the true capabilities of the technologies being developed today, unlocking new forms of human creativity and empowering Americans to achieve what was previously impossible." The argument is that "AI" implies software merely imitating human thought, while "SI" acknowledges systems the administration says already exceed human capability. The same fact sheet leans on scale to make its case: it cites $5 billion committed to the "Genesis Mission" to accelerate breakthroughs in science, medicine, energy, and manufacturing, points to more than 90 federal actions already taken under the AI Action Plan released in July 2025, and frames the moment against roughly 70 years of American leadership in the field since it began as a research discipline.
Four Names, One Mandate: The Super Intelligence Force
On October 4, 2026, Trump used Truth Social to announce the four officials who will run the Super Intelligence Force, describing its job as coordinating "the effort of the Federal Government to ensure that America continues to lead the World in Super Intelligence, which many say is bigger than the Industrial Revolution, and the Internet." The task force answers directly to Trump and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
Who's Actually Running It
- Jay Clayton (Chair) — Director of National Intelligence, the ninth person to hold the post; previously U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and SEC chairman during Trump's first term.
- Andrew Ferguson (Vice Chair) — FTC Chairman; formerly Virginia solicitor general and chief counsel to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.
- Emil Michael (Vice Chair) — Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering and the Pentagon's chief technology officer, overseeing DARPA and the Missile Defense Agency; previously helped scale Uber and Tellme Networks.
- Scott Kupor (Vice Chair) — Director of the Office of Personnel Management, sworn in July 2025 after a decade as a managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
120 Days, and a Notable Absence
The Force has 120 days to deliver a report on AI's risks and opportunities and to define the government's role — with an explicit mandate to do so while "preventing overregulation" that could slow innovation. What stands out about the roster is who isn't on it: no university AI researcher, no bioethicist, no independent safety researcher. The four leaders represent intelligence, antitrust enforcement, defense R&D, and federal personnel — national security, market structure, military technology, and workforce, in that order. It's a lineup built to execute policy and commercialize capability, not to referee whether the capability itself is safe.
The Petition That Beat Them to 76,000 Signatures
The Super Intelligence Force wasn't announced into a vacuum. A year earlier, on October 22, 2025, the Future of Life Institute — the nonprofit run by MIT physicist Max Tegmark — published what it calls the "Statement on Superintelligence." Its core demand is a single sentence: "We call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and strong public buy-in."
An Unlikely Coalition
What's kept the statement in the news for a year isn't its length — it's who signed it. The list spans people who otherwise sit on opposite sides of almost every political fight:
- Geoffrey Hinton — winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for his AI research, and one of the field's most prominent "godfathers."
- Yoshua Bengio — fellow Turing Award-winning AI researcher, frequently named alongside Hinton as a founding figure of deep learning.
- Steve Wozniak — Apple co-founder.
- Steve Bannon — former chief strategist in Trump's first administration.
- Susan Rice — former U.S. National Security Advisor.
- Prince Harry and Meghan Markle — the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
- Richard Branson and Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland.
By this week, the statement's own tally stood at roughly 76,000 signatures — a figure that, by the organization's own accounting, folds in about 5,000 signatures gathered through a companion petition run by the advocacy group Ekō. A separate, smaller Change.org petition invoking the same Nobel-laureate and ex-military signatories has drawn only a few hundred signatures on its own, underscoring that the bulk of the movement's weight sits behind the Future of Life Institute's own statement rather than any single mirror of it. Either way, the sustained growth from a launch-day list of prominent names to tens of thousands of public signatures over twelve months is the part the administration's order didn't make disappear.
Two Documents, Opposite Premises
Strip away the politics and what's left are two documents answering the same underlying question — what should the government's posture toward advanced AI be — with incompatible answers.
| Super Intelligence Force | Statement on Superintelligence | |
|---|---|---|
| Origin | Executive Order 14434, signed September 29, 2026 | Future of Life Institute statement, published October 22, 2025 |
| Leadership named | October 4, 2026 — four Trump administration officials | No formal leadership; signed by individuals, not an organization's staff |
| Core position | Rename, promote, and accelerate development; avoid "overregulation" | Prohibit development of superintelligence until safety consensus and public buy-in exist |
| Who's behind it | National Intelligence, FTC, Pentagon R&D, and OPM leadership | Nobel laureates, AI researchers, ex-military leaders, political figures across the spectrum |
| Deadline attached | 120-day policy report; legislative language on SI definition due November 28, 2026 | None — open-ended until the stated safety and public-buy-in conditions are met |
| Scale as of early October 2026 | 4 appointees | ~76,000 signatures |
What Happens in the Next 120 Days
Nothing here resolves on its own. The Super Intelligence Force's 120-day clock and the November 28 legislative-language deadline both land before the end of the year, which means the administration will have to show something concrete — a report, a proposed statutory definition, or both — right around the time the Future of Life Institute's signature count keeps climbing. Neither side has the power to simply overrule the other: Trump's order reaches federal terminology and policy coordination, not the labs actually building frontier models, and the statement's signatories have no enforcement mechanism beyond public pressure and the credibility of the names attached to it. What the next few months will actually test is whether a rebranding exercise and a petition can coexist indefinitely, or whether one of them is forced to bend.
-EditorZ
Photo by Tomasz Zielonka on Unsplash
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