What Is Super Intelligence? Trump’s AI Rename

Key Takeaways:

On September 29, 2026, an executive order directed all US executive-branch departments and agencies to replace “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in official documents.

The rename is a labeling change. In technical literature, superintelligence means an intellect far exceeding human cognitive performance in virtually all domains, a standard today’s systems do not meet.

ASI-Bench, an arXiv benchmark built by more than 40 experts, records an average score drop from 50.91 with full methodological guidance to 26.62 across 18 agent-model configurations when agents must choose their own methods.

Slovenia’s .si registry logged an average of about 3,700 new domains per day after the UN speech, versus roughly 3,500 for all of August, pushing the namespace past 220,000.

What the Order Actually Requires

On September 29, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence.” The text directs all executive-branch departments and agencies to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in official correspondence, public communications, policy documents, and non-statutory documents, and to no longer acknowledge “Artificial Intelligence” or “AI” in applicable settings, per the White House fact sheet.

What Netcraft Found Before the Announcement

Three implementation details matter more than the headline. First, the order does not retroactively alter previously issued regulations, existing government contracts, grants, or archival records, according to reporting on the directive’s text. A contract written in August still says “AI,” and no one is obligated to re-litigate it. Second, the administration temporarily applies the existing statutory definition of artificial intelligence under Title 15 of the US Code to “Super Intelligence.” The operational meaning inside government is, for now, the old definition wearing a new label. Third, the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology has 60 days to propose legislative language for a new federal statutory definition.

The fact sheet ties the framing to more than $5 billion for the Genesis Mission, a national effort to apply the technology to science, medicine, energy, and manufacturing. It also cites a July 2025 action plan and a March 2026 policy framework that predate the rename. Trump previewed the change at the UN General Assembly on September 22, telling the chamber that US documents would switch to “the much more accurate term, ‘super,’ as opposed to ‘artificial’,” and that the old word made the technology sound fake, reported Nextgov. The fact sheet’s framing, that these systems are “not simply imitating or automating human intelligence,” is where the technical trouble starts, because that is precisely what the word “artificial” was designed to signal.

Two Meanings of the Same Phrase

Anyone who searched “what is super intelligence” hits a collision, because the phrase already had a technical definition. Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book Superintelligence defines it as “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest.” That is a claim about capability, not branding, and it sits a step beyond artificial general intelligence, which OpenAI’s charter defines as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”

The rename does not move today’s systems toward either threshold. A government can adopt a word by signature; it cannot adopt the capability the word traditionally described. If a contractor reads “SI” in a procurement document and assumes the systems being bought are superintelligent in the Bostrom sense, they have imported a capability claim the order never made. The order is a terminology directive, not a capability declaration.

Some researchers dispute whether the concept is coherent at all. In “AI as Normal Technology,” Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan write that there is no useful sense of “intelligence” in which AI is more intelligent than people acting with the help of AI, as quoted in the Nextgov piece. On the other side, Caleb Withers of the Center for a New American Security told Nextgov that “super” aligns with the fact that AI is exceeding human capabilities in a growing range of tasks by increasing margins, which carries national-security implications beyond simply matching human performance. Both readings are about capability, and both are orthogonal to what the executive order actually does, which is rename a label.

Where the Technology Actually Stands

Measured evidence is the useful counterweight to naming debates. ASI-Bench, published on arXiv in August 2026, was built by more than 40 experts at a cost of 31,000+ human hours. It contains 60 project-level research tasks across 11 scientific domains and progressively withdraws human methodological guidance within the same research project. It does not just test whether a model can answer a question, but whether it can carry a research project from method selection to verifiable result on its own. Across 18 agent-model configurations, the average score drops from 50.91 with full methodological guidance to 29.10 with only the method specified and 26.62 when agents must determine the method themselves.

Guidance level	Average score (18 configs)	Source
Full methodological guidance	50.91	ASI-Bench, arXiv 2608.17271
Method specified, steps left to the agent	29.10	ASI-Bench, arXiv 2608.17271
Agent must determine the method itself	26.62	ASI-Bench, arXiv 2608.17271

For engineering teams: a naming change and a capability change are different events, and the benchmark measures the second one. Treat “SI” as a policy label with a live, undetermined federal definition rather than a specification. If procurement or compliance documents must reference the technology, the Title 15 definition currently applies, and the statutory language is still 60 days out from a proposal, let alone enactment.

A team logging model evaluations against “AI” benchmarks does not need to change its pipeline because the label changed. But a compliance team that must certify a system under a future statutory definition of “Super Intelligence” cannot yet know what that definition will say. Pin any contractual language to the Title 15 definition explicitly, so a future statutory change does not silently re-scope an existing obligation. Here is what that looks like as a documentation tag:

# Note: this does not cover the future statutory definition the APST
# is required to propose within 60 days of the Sept 29, 2026 order.
# Until then, "Super Intelligence" inherits the existing Title 15
# definition of artificial intelligence.
SI_TERM_REFERENCE = "Title 15 U.S.C. (current statutory definition)"
SI_TERM_STATUS = "pending federal definition (60-day APST deadline)"

def label_system(capability_report):
 # Pin to the definition that is actually in force today, not the
 # aspirational label, so a future statutory change cannot re-scope
 # an existing procurement or compliance obligation.
 if capability_report.definition != SI_TERM_REFERENCE:
 raise ValueError("Pin the definition, not the marketing label")
 return capability_report

The snippet encodes a discipline: reference the definition in force, not the trending word. That is the same discipline the domain market failed to apply.

SI Collides With Slovenia’s Country Code

Slovenia’s .si top-level domain is administered by ARNES through the Register.si portal. The abbreviation “SI” now carries a second, US-government-endorsed reading, and the registry felt it immediately. The country has about 2.1 million residents, and for most of the past year the registrar recorded roughly a thousand new registrations a month, according to Foreign Policy.

“Since the speech, there has been a strong but stable increase of requests for the use of the ‘.si’ domain,” Register.si spokeswoman Klara Herman told Euronews. The agency registered an average of 3,700 new domains per day after the speech, compared with around 3,500 for the entire month of August, pushing the total past 220,000.

Foreign Policy added the daily shape: more than 2,000 new .si registrations on the day of the speech and more than 4,000 the day after, bringing September’s total past 10,000.

Price explains part of the appeal. Netcraft put .si at around $11 for one year against roughly $180 for a minimum two-year .ai registration. Lithuania-based registrar Hostinger began advertising .si domains on September 23, the day after the speech, at $11.99 for the first year and $16.99 thereafter, with an ad reading “AI is now called superintelligence. Register your .si domain.” Hostinger’s head of domains told Foreign Policy that nearly all of the company’s .si orders were new registrations, not transfers, and that “people aren’t moving existing websites. They’re claiming new names while the good ones are still available.” Registrations at Dynadot, which runs a domain aftermarket, outpaced the .ai namespace within 25 hours of the speech.

What Netcraft Found Before the Announcement

Netcraft’s researchers found the initial spike beginning roughly three days earlier, around September 19, which lines up with a Truth Social poll Trump ran that day at 15:29 UTC asking about renaming AI, according to the firm’s September 24 analysis. The domain security company stated it “cannot determine whether registrants were acting on anticipation of the announcement or unrelated factors.” That sentence is load-bearing for the whole story, and most secondary coverage drops it.

The aftermarket pattern is the harder evidence. Approximately 52% of .si domains Netcraft detected registered at Dynadot between the poll and the speech were listed for resale on Dynadot’s aftermarket. Examples included donaldjtrump.si, superintell.si, boeing.si, puffin.si, vaccination.si, and unitedstate.si. Buying at retail and relisting at a markup is the mechanics of domain flipping, and Netcraft spelled out the incentive: an investor who correctly predicts interest in a TLD “could potentially stand to profit by speculatively buying domains at retail price and then reselling them when there is interest.” The company also found more than 44,000 currently registered .si and .ai domains that share the same second-level string, 22% of all .si domains, of which 1,500 pairs resolved to the same IP address.

A parallel betting market opened too: a Polymarket event titled “Trump renames AI by September 30?” opened on September 20 and had drawn $151,000 in bets by the afternoon of September 23, per Netcraft. The existence of a market on the rename itself, days before the order, is a data point about how fast the speculation layer formed, not evidence of any particular actor’s knowledge.

Confirmed Facts Versus Allegations

Confirmed: the executive order exists and its text is public; Register.si’s registration counts are registry-published; Netcraft’s aftermarket percentage and timeline come from its own internet survey data; the Polymarket figure was visible on the platform. Also on the record: Anthropic registered five domains, including claudesuperintelligence.com and anthropicsuperintelligence.org, within about three hours of the speech, according to The Deep Dive. Registering defensively is ordinary corporate practice, but it shows how fast the naming race started.

Alleged, and unproven: crypto analyst Adam Cochran claims that speculators scooped up or flipped roughly 12,000 AI- and MAGA-themed domains in the two months before the announcement, and has described it as a scheme to enrich people close to the president, as reported by The Deep Dive. No registrant has been publicly identified, no evidence of advance knowledge has been published, and Netcraft’s own data cannot distinguish anticipation from coincidence. Until someone produces registrant records, this remains an allegation.

Attribution matters in the other direction as well. ARNES spokeswoman Herman cautioned against assigning the entire increase to the president, telling Foreign Policy that “the upward trend was already there before the recent attention around ‘SI.'” The registry also pushed back on a secondary claim, writing in a blog post that media speculation about “millions of earnings for Slovenia” has “no real basis,” since Register.si charges 10 euros per registration and does not set end-user prices. The registry’s own economics are flat-fee and small; the windfall, if any, accrues to registrars and aftermarket sellers, not to Slovenia.

The Economics of the Aftermarket

Understanding the allegations requires understanding the unit economics of a domain flip. The play: register a name at retail, list it on an aftermarket at a markup, and wait for either an end buyer or the news cycle to decay. The retail-to-aftermarket spread is visible in action, with names like superintell.si relisted above the cost of an unregistered .si domain.

The asymmetry that makes flipping rational is the near-zero cost of action. A .si registration is around $11 for a year, so a speculator can buy hundreds of names for the price of one .ai registration. The downside is bounded: if no one buys, the registrant is out the registration fee and the name lapses. The upside, if “SI” catches on the way “AI” did for Anguilla’s .ai domain, is a resale multiple. Foreign Policy noted that Anguilla made around $32 million off .ai registrations in 2023, more than 20% of the government’s annual revenue, according to the International Monetary Fund. That is the template speculators are betting .si will repeat.

But the comparison has a crack. The .ai boom followed a real product surge, the 2022 launch of ChatGPT, that put “AI” into everyday vocabulary for years. The .si surge follows a terminology directive whose durability depends on how long the current administration uses the phrase and whether other governments follow. ARNES’s own caution, that the upward trend predates the speech and cannot be fully attributed to it, cuts against the clean narrative that the rename alone drove everything. A registrant who bought names in June, before the September poll, was betting on a trend already visible in the .si namespace, not on a specific announcement.

What to Watch Next

Three things resolve this story. The APST’s proposed statutory definition, due within 60 days of the order, will determine whether “Super Intelligence” means anything operationally different from the Title 15 definition it currently borrows. The aftermarket listings are falsifiable: if the resale supply was speculative positioning, prices on names like superintell.si either find buyers or decay as the news cycle passes. Netcraft also flagged a security dimension worth tracking, noting that “s” sits next to “a” on a QWERTY keyboard, making .si a one-keystroke typo of .ai and a natural target for lookalike registration, while observing that fraud on the TLD is currently at a low level.

The technical gap remains the number that matters. Until systems score closer to 50.91 without the guidance scaffold than with it, “super intelligence” describes a policy aspiration rather than an engineering measurement.

Sources and References

Sources cited while researching and writing this article: