At 11:15 a.m. Eastern on October 1, a three-page executive order was filed at the Office of the Federal Register's public-inspection desk. It is numbered 14434, dated at the White House on September 29, and titled "Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence." It is scheduled to be published in the Federal Register on October 2.

Its instruction is a vocabulary change. Section 2 directs executive departments and agencies, "to the maximum extent permitted by law," to use "Super Intelligence" and "SI" in place of "Artificial Intelligence" and "AI" in "official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents, and other non-statutory documents within the executive branch." Section 1 adds a clause Section 2 does not carry. It states that it is the policy of the administration that, to the maximum extent permitted by law, the executive branch "will not acknowledge the usage of 'Artificial Intelligence' and 'AI' in any applicable setting."

Then Section 3 says what the new words mean:

For purposes of this order, and except where otherwise provided by law, the terms "Super Intelligence" and "SI" mean the technologies and systems encompassed by the term "artificial intelligence" as defined in section 9401(3) of title 15, United States Code.

That is a cross-reference, and it is worth following, because it is the only place the order says what it is talking about.

What the statute the order points at actually says

Section 9401 of title 15 is the definitions section of the chapter Congress titled the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative. The definition was enacted as section 5002 of division E of Public Law 116-283 on January 1, 2021, in a division Congress named the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act of 2020. Paragraph (3) reads, in full:

The term "artificial intelligence" means a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations or decisions influencing real or virtual environments. Artificial intelligence systems use machine and human-based inputs to— (A) perceive real and virtual environments; (B) abstract such perceptions into models through analysis in an automated manner; and (C) use model inference to formulate options for information or action.

Read it twice and notice what it does not contain. There is no threshold of capability in it. There is no comparison to a person. There is nothing about frontier systems, scale, autonomy or generality. It turns on structure: a machine that takes inputs, builds a model and produces options or decisions for a set of objectives a human gave it. How capable the machine is does not enter the test.

The order's own first section describes something else. It says the "extraordinary technologies being pioneered by American innovators far exceed what was envisioned when the term 'Artificial Intelligence' first came into use." It says the capabilities of today's frontier systems "do much more than imitate or automate discrete aspects of human intelligence." Those are statements about capability. The definition the order then adopts carries no capability test at all.

The order addresses that gap itself, in Section 3(b).

The gap has a deadline, and it runs to one official

Within 60 days of the order's date, the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology must submit to the President "proposed legislative language to establish a Federal definition" of the new terms "that reflects the capabilities described in section 1 of this order." The proposal has to include an assessment of whether and how far the new definition should "modify, expand upon, or otherwise supersede the existing statutory definition of 'artificial intelligence'." It also has to include any proposed conforming amendments to existing statutory references to the old terms, and recommendations for any additional Presidential or executive action needed to implement the proposed definition.

Sixty days from September 29 is November 28, 2026, by this desk's count. The order prints no date of its own, and sets no alternate date for a deadline that lands on a Saturday.

Two details about that clock are easy to skim past. The submission goes to the President: the order says the proposed legislative language is submitted to the President, and says nothing about sending it to Congress or introducing it there. And the definition now in force is not displaced by the proposal. Section 3(a) says the existing definition "shall govern the implementation of this order unless and until superseded by subsequent Presidential action consistent with applicable law or by an Act of Congress."

Where the word changes, and where it does not

The order limits its own reach in four places, and those limits are the clearest guide to what it does.

Section 2(a) covers "non-statutory documents." Section 2(b) says nothing in the section "requires the alteration of previously issued regulations, Presidential actions, contracts, grants, or other historical documents." Section 4 says the order creates no "right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States," its departments, agencies, officers, employees or agents, "or any other person." The same section says the order is to be implemented "subject to the availability of appropriations."

Put those together and the shape is plain. The new word goes into the documents the order lists — official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports and policy documents. The old word is left where it already is: the order does not require anyone to change the statute, the regulations already on the books, or the contracts and grants already signed.

What this means if you have to work with either word

For anyone who writes grant applications, reads federal guidance, or has to tell a regulator what their product does, the position the two documents set out is narrow and knowable:

The definition did not move. For purposes of the order, and except where otherwise provided by law, "Super Intelligence" and "SI" mean the technologies encompassed by the definition in 15 U.S.C. 9401(3), and that text is free to read.
Old documents keep their old words. A regulation, contract or grant that says "artificial intelligence" is not amended by this order, and Section 2(b) says nothing in that section requires it to be altered.
The thing to watch is the legislative proposal, not the vocabulary. A new statutory definition — if one is ever enacted — is what would change which systems federal requirements actually reach.

A name is not nothing; it shapes how a government describes its own work, and Section 1 says the terminology used by the Federal Government should reflect what the order calls the transformative capabilities of these technologies. But a definition is the part that decides what a rule applies to, and this order's definition is a pointer to a sentence Congress wrote at the start of 2021. For now, the sentence is the answer.

A new executive order tells agencies to say 'Super Intelligence' instead of 'AI', then defines the new term as the old one

What the statute the order points at actually says

The gap has a deadline, and it runs to one official

Where the word changes, and where it does not

What this means if you have to work with either word

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