The White House ordered federal agencies to stop saying “AI.” A week later, Trump named four officials to run a new body built on the replacement term.

President Trump signed an executive order titled “Inaugurating The Era Of Super Intelligence” on 29 September 2026. Fetched directly from the White House’s own site, the order’s operative text states that “the executive branch shall use the terms ‘Super Intelligence’ and ‘SI’ in place of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI'” in official correspondence, public communications and non-statutory policy documents. It also directs the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology to submit, within 60 days, proposed legislative language establishing a federal definition of “Super Intelligence.”

On 4 October 2026, Trump announced a second, related step: the formation of a “Super Intelligence Force,” posted from the official White House account, which states the body “is tasked with coordinating the effort of the Federal Government to ensure that America continues to lead the World in Super Intelligence.” Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton chairs it. Multiple outlets, including CBS News, NBC News and SiliconANGLE, independently named the same three vice chairs: Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson, Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael, and Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor.

Why it matters

A mandated terminology change inside the federal government is not cosmetic for vendors selling into it: procurement language, grant criteria and agency compliance documents will eventually have to follow, and companies that keep marketing “AI” products to federal buyers may find themselves translating their own materials to match. More substantively, the Force’s 120-day mandate — reported by NBC News and SiliconANGLE, though not present in the terminology order itself — would produce a consolidated federal view on AI risk and regulation, a deliverable this administration has not previously assigned to a single body.

The accompanying accord matters differently: six companies that compete directly with each other, including rivals covered regularly on this site, agreed to a shared external floor for safety controls at the same table as the terminology order. That is a different posture than the lab-by-lab safety commitments this site has tracked, such as OpenAI’s own cyber evaluation disclosures.

What is confirmed directly and what is not

The terminology order and its 60-day legislative deadline are confirmed directly from the White House’s own published text — Tier 1, no intermediary. The Force’s existence, its chair, and its three named vice chairs are also confirmed at source: the announcement came from the official White House account, and four independent news organisations (CBS, NBC, ABC and SiliconANGLE) reported identical names and titles with no contradiction.

The voluntary accord is a different case. Multiple outlets, including Nextgov/FCW, Axios and MSSP Alert, reported that six chief executives — Google’s Sundar Pichai, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, xAI’s Elon Musk and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang — signed the accord alongside Trump on 29 September 2026, and that it commits signatories to four layers of control: internal monitoring during training and deployment, an internal oversight team, independent external audits, and an independent board-level committee reviewing both. We could not locate the accord’s own text on whitehouse.gov; every account of its specific commitments traces to press reporting, not to a document we could fetch and quote directly. The reporting is consistent across outlets with no contradictions found, but it remains secondary sourcing for a primary event.

Also reported but not independently verified by us: a Wall Street Journal account, relayed by other outlets, that Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will also serve on the Force, with Condoleezza Rice and venture capitalist David Sacks advising from outside government. We are treating that roster as reported, not confirmed, since it did not appear in the material we could fetch directly from the White House.

What this means for buyers

Enterprises and agencies with federal contracts should expect vendor-facing paperwork to begin referencing “Super Intelligence” or “SI” terminology on a timeline tied to agency compliance cycles, not immediately. Anyone selling AI products into federal agencies should start tracking the Assistant to the President’s forthcoming legislative language, due within 60 days of the 29 September order, since a federal statutory definition of “Super Intelligence” could reshape what counts as a regulated product.

For buyers evaluating vendors on safety practice rather than policy exposure, the accord’s four-layer framework — internal controls, internal oversight, external audit, board-level review — is a reasonable checklist to ask any of the six signatories to confirm against, even though the accord itself is voluntary and carries no penalties that any source has identified.

What would change our reading

This story is gated REPORTED rather than CLEAR because its most substantive claim — the accord’s exact commitments and signatories — rests entirely on press reporting with no primary document we could locate or fetch. A whitehouse.gov posting of the accord’s text, or a joint statement from one of the six signatory companies confirming the same four-layer language, would move that portion to CLEAR. Similarly, confirmation or denial from the White House of the broader Force roster (Vance, Hegseth, Bessent, Rice, Sacks) reported via the Wall Street Journal would resolve the one roster detail we have flagged as unconfirmed.