Trump’s 'Super Intelligence' order: Will it stick? This linguist thinks not

Do you want Freedom Fries with that?

This linguistic flashback is brought to you by the year 2003, when a North Carolina restaurant owner renamed French fries in response to France’s refusal to support or participate in America’s controversial invasion of Iraq. 

Rep. Bob Ney, the Republican chairman of the House Administration Committee at the time, joined the fray with Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina, ordering the House cafeterias to delete “French” from the names of French fries, French toast, and French bread. 

The menu items were rechristened Freedom fries, Freedom toast, and Freedom bread.

Well, we all know how long that lasted. 

The popularity of “Freedom Fries” faded along with support for the war, and the House cafeterias eventually reverted to the items’ original names.

With Donald Trump’s return to Pennsylvania Avenue, common English names and phrases are going for another wild ride. 

The Gulf of Mexico became “The Gulf of America,” and Trump was so adamant about the change that the Associated Press was banned from the White House for refusing to use the new term.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg used the term ‘Super Intelligence’ in July 2025

Bloomberg / Getty Images

Trump issues executive order: ‘Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence’

After Trump’s tariff tiff with Canada, the president moved to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” for U.S. federal use.

The leader of the free world then trained his sights on artificial intelligence, scrubbing the term in favor “Super Intelligence” via a Sept. 29 executive order.

Related: Meta and Microsoft just sent employees a memo about Anthropic

Trump has downplayed warnings from safety experts who want to slow down or strictly regulate the industry.

The order directs executive departments and agencies 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.

“The terminology used by the Federal Government should reflect the transformative capabilities of these technologies and the limitless opportunities they create for the American people,” the order stated.  

“Accordingly, the term ‘Super Intelligence’ more appropriately captures the promise, potential, and rapidly advancing capabilities of these technologies.”

The executive order also says the executive branch “will not acknowledge” the use of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” in applicable settings.

Trump and several top U.S. tech executives also signed a “morally binding” agreement to put controls on artificial intelligence — oops, Super Intelligence.

The tech bros seem to be into the new handle. Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, who had been using the term for a while, announced he would rebrand SpaceX’s artificial intelligence unit from SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI to align with the Trump administration.

“No more AI. SI. It’s better,” Musk wrote on X, the social media platform that he owns.

Meta Platforms (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg was using the term long before Trump’s order. In July 2025, he published “Personal Superintelligence for Everyone,” outlining his desire to put this high-level capability directly into the hands of billions of everyday users.

Meta also launched its Meta Superintelligence Labs.

Nevertheless, Zuck took some hits last month on Threads, the social media platform he owns, for employing the term.

“The fact you actually used Trump’s bullsh*t ‘superintelligence’ is so f*cking pathetic,” one user wrote. “What a bootlicking sellout!”

“META has been branding Superintelligence since June of 2025,” another commenter said. “He’s just not going to change it because 47 is trying to hijack it to take credit for the name.  Microsoft and Nvidia have also been using it for over a year.”

Elon Musk announced he would rebrand SpaceX’s artificial intelligence unit from SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI to align with the Trump administration.

Finn Gomez / Getty Images

Is the phrase ‘super intelligence’ here to stay?

The question is whether this term will have staying power or whether it will join Freedom Fries in the graveyard of failed phrases.

“I don’t believe the Superintelligence term will last in the way Trump and tech execs are currently using it, based on other patterns we’ve seen,” said Sylvia Sierra, a linguist and Associate Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. 

“Language change tends to take root when it’s a bottom-up process, rather than a top-down process — people in power telling others how to use language tends not to stick.”

Sierra noted “Freedom Fries” did not catch on because it was a top-down, politically motivated language change.

The North Carolina restaurant owner who started using “Freedom Fries” said he was inspired by similar actions against Germany in World War I, when sauerkraut was called “liberty cabbage.”

“Obviously, that didn’t last,” Sierra said. “Similarly, at that time Salisbury steak and Liberty Steaks were used as an alternative name for hamburgers.”

Superintelligence is a “somewhat tricky case,” she noted, because the term already had a meaning in artificial intelligence discussions before Trump adopted it.

Philosopher Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, helped establish the term’s modern usage to refer to machines whose intelligence could vastly exceed that of humans.

“Apparently, he said the word ‘artificial’ makes it sound fake, and it is not fake,” she said. “It’s actually amazing. I think it’s possible Trump likes the sound of ‘superintelligence’ because he enjoys superlatives and adjectives like ‘big,’ ‘huge,’ ‘amazing,’ etc. Or in negative cases, ‘worst,’ ‘horrible,’ etc.”

“In Trump’s own explanation of why he prefers superintelligence to artificial intelligence,” Sierra said, “it’s apparent that he thinks the former makes the word sound more ‘positive,’ and that’s often the effect of using this kind of simplified and extreme language — to cast certain things as good and others as bad, removing nuance.”

A senior Trump Justice Department official recently directed the workforce to replace the term “AI” with “Super Intelligence” in official communications, including in court filings, “when appropriate,” Bloomberg Law reported. The directive followed Trump’s executive order.

Still, Sierra has her doubts.

“My sense is this word might gain some traction temporarily, but it will probably not outlast Trump’s final term as president,” she said.

Related: Musk called Anthropic ‘evil’; SpaceX’s deal with it nearly doubled

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