In official US government documents, artificial intelligence no longer exists.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump signed an executive order entitled "Inaugurating the era of superintelligence". From now on, all federal departments and agencies must write "Super Intelligence", or "SI", instead of "artificial intelligence". And, according to the White House, they must no longer recognise the old terms.
Why the new name
The president explained it himself, a few hours earlier. In essence: when you say "artificial", it sounds fake. Yet this intelligence is anything but artificial, it is extreme, superior, and the word "super" is, in his view, the best of all. He added that he had discussed it with the Chinese president, who supposedly loved it.
One could leave it at the anecdote. But this executive order was signed on the same day as another text, a far more important one.
A commitment signed at the White House
On Tuesday, Donald Trump hosted around twenty tech leaders for lunch. Among them: Jensen Huang for Nvidia, Greg Brockman for OpenAI, Dario Amodei for Anthropic, Sundar Pichai for Google, Mark Zuckerberg for Meta and Elon Musk for xAI.
After the meal, they signed a two-page document entitled "White House Agreement on Superintelligence". In it, the companies commit to maintaining robust internal controls and several levels of verification, both internal and external, on their most advanced models.
The text is voluntary. It provides for no penalties, and does not require companies to publish the results of their audits. Asked whether it was binding, the president replied that it was "morally binding", and compared it to a constitution.
The executive order states in black and white that "superintelligence" refers to exactly the same technologies as the legal definition of artificial intelligence. Nothing changes in what these systems do, nor in the rules that apply to them. Only the word is different. And it promises far more than the old one.
What it really changes
In substance, this agreement entrusts the oversight of the most powerful AIs to the companies that build them. This is exactly the debate we have been following for weeks, between the plan for a standards body for the major labs and the arrival of independent evaluators within some of them.
The criticism came from the president's own camp. Republican senator Josh Hawley published an op-ed explaining that AI companies should not get a free pass. And according to the polls, Americans are increasingly wary of this technology.
One door remains open: the agreement does not rule out stricter federal rules in the future, which several of the bosses present say they would in fact welcome.
What we take away
In a single day, Washington changed two things. The name of the technology, which becomes bigger and more impressive. And the way it is overseen, which remains in the hands of those who sell it.
The first change will raise a smile. The second matters far more. The word was changed, not the rule.