What Does Executive Order 14434 of 29 September 2026 Change When Federal Agencies Must Say “Super Intelligence” Instead of “AI”?
In August 1955 four researchers, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon, wrote a funding proposal for a summer workshop at Dartmouth College. The proposal needed a name for its subject, and it used the phrase “artificial intelligence.” The workshop met in 1956. Seventy years later, the President of the United States has signed an order that tells the federal executive branch to stop using that phrase.
Executive Order 14434, “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence,” was signed on 29 September 2026 and published in the Federal Register on 2 October 2026 at 91 FR 63129–63130 (FR Doc. 2026-20321). Its purpose section recalls the Dartmouth story without naming it: American scientists “first gave the field its name,” and the capabilities of current frontier systems now “far exceed what was envisioned” when the term came into use. The order is short, two printed pages, and most of its effect sits in two subsections. This post works through one question: what changes, for whom, and when?
Practical takeaway. For now the order changes words in executive-branch documents and leaves the legal meaning of artificial intelligence untouched. The date that matters is about 28 November 2026, when the President's science adviser must deliver draft legislation that could rewrite the federal definition. Anyone who searches, monitors or maps federal AI policy should add “Super Intelligence” to their vocabulary today.
What Executive Order 14434 orders, section by section, as published at 91 FR 63129 on 2 October 2026
Section 1 sets the policy. “To the maximum extent permitted by law,” the executive branch “shall use the terms ‘Super Intelligence’ and ‘SI’ in place of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI’ and will not acknowledge the usage of” the older terms “in any applicable setting.” The phrase “will not acknowledge” is unusual in an executive order. Read with section 2, it most plausibly governs what agencies write themselves; the order does not say what an agency does with a public comment, a contractor filing or a court brief that uses “AI.”
Section 2(a) lists where the new terms apply: official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents “and other non-statutory documents within the executive branch.” Section 2(b) protects the past. Nothing requires the alteration of previously issued regulations, Presidential actions, contracts, grants or other historical documents. Section 4 carries the usual general provisions: agency authority and the Office of Management and Budget's functions are unaffected, implementation is subject to appropriations, the order creates no enforceable rights, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy pays for its publication.
The order has precedents in form. Executive Order 14172 of 20 January 2025 renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America for federal use, and Executive Order 14347 of 5 September 2025 authorized “Department of War” as a secondary title for the Department of Defense. Both renamed a place or an institution. Executive Order 14434 renames a technology, and a technology is also a legal category that statutes, regulations and contracts depend on.
Why section 3(a) defines Super Intelligence by 15 U.S.C. 9401(3), and who can change that definition
Section 3(a) answers the obvious worry. For purposes of the order, “Super Intelligence” and “SI” mean “the technologies and systems encompassed by the term ‘artificial intelligence’ as defined in section 9401(3) of title 15.” That is the definition Congress wrote into the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act of 2020: a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations or decisions influencing real or virtual environments, using machine and human-based inputs to perceive environments, abstract them into models and formulate options through model inference.
That definition is wide. It covers frontier language models, and it also covers a fraud-scoring model at a bank, a route planner and a product recommender. Under section 3(a), all of them are now “Super Intelligence” in executive-branch prose. The new name describes the frontier, and the definition attached to it describes the whole field. In the research literature, “superintelligence” usually means a system that exceeds human ability across most domains, so the federal usage and the scientific usage now point at different things. The order itself does not try to settle which systems meet any capability threshold.
The definition also holds only “unless and until superseded by subsequent Presidential action consistent with applicable law or by an Act of Congress.” A later Presidential action can therefore replace the order's working definition for executive-branch use; changing the statutory definition itself takes legislation. Federal law already contains more than one statutory definition of artificial intelligence, and the order picks one of them as its reference point. Statutes keep their own words. The National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office that the Act set up inside OSTP keeps its statutory name, even though OSTP is the office paying to publish an order that asks agencies to stop saying “artificial intelligence.”
What the legislative proposal due around 28 November 2026 could change
Section 3(b) is where the order can change the law. Within 60 days of 29 September, which falls on or about 28 November 2026, the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology must submit to the President proposed legislative language for a federal definition of “Super Intelligence” and “SI” that “reflects the capabilities described in section 1.” The proposal must include three things: an assessment of whether the new definition should “modify, expand upon, or otherwise supersede” the statutory definition of artificial intelligence; proposed conforming amendments to existing statutory references to “artificial intelligence” and “AI”; and recommendations for further Presidential or executive action.
That is where scope can move. Section 1 describes systems that “amplify human ingenuity” and enable what was “previously impossible.” A definition drafted around those capabilities could be narrower than 9401(3), leaving ordinary prediction systems outside the new term, or it could replace the old definition wholesale through conforming amendments. Changing the statutory text, and with it the scope of statutes that cross-refer to the definition, needs an Act of Congress. Section 3(a) separately allows a later Presidential action consistent with law to replace the order's own working definition. The draft goes to the President, and section 4(a)(ii) preserves OMB's role in clearing legislative proposals, so 28 November is a deadline for submitting a proposal and changes no law by itself. Nothing in the order requires the draft to be published.
State law runs on its own vocabulary in the meantime. We looked at one state instrument last month, California's Executive Order N-9-26 of 18 September 2026 and its relation to SB 53, where the legal duties attach to statutory terms the state legislature chose. A federal rename does not reach those texts.
Where “SI” meets NIST's International System of Units, the EU AI Act and federal search
The abbreviation chosen has a long prior owner. “SI” is the international abbreviation for the Système international d'unités, the metric system of units, and the federal agency that publishes the official U.S. edition is NIST, in Special Publication 330, The International System of Units. NIST is also the agency that writes the government's AI risk-management guidance. From 29 September its new documents are expected to use “SI” for two different things. Careful drafting can keep them apart; full-text search and machine-readable metadata will have a harder time.
That is the most immediate practical effect. Agencies tag, index and publish documents, and journalists, researchers, companies and courts find them by searching for the words agencies use. New executive-branch documents about AI may now carry neither “AI” nor “artificial intelligence.” The Plain Writing Act of 2010 requires agencies to write documents the public can understand and use; a reader searching a federal site for “AI” in 2027 should still be able to find the agency's policy on it. For citizens, the question is whether the government's account of a technology that shapes credit, benefits and policing stays easy to find.
Across the Atlantic the vocabulary stays where it was. Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, the AI Act, builds its obligations on the defined term “AI system” in Article 3(1), and international standards such as ISO/IEC 22989 use the same family of terms. Companies that answer to both jurisdictions already map U.S. federal guidance onto EU obligations. From now on that mapping includes a translation step, and if the 28 November proposal produces a narrower or broader statutory definition, the translation becomes a scope question as well.
How Quentir Reads It
The order does not itself amend existing statutes, regulations, contracts or grants; their applicable definitions and obligations remain controlling, so on 2 October 2026 none of them means anything different. A change to statutory scope would come through the 60-day proposal and an Act of Congress, and a later Presidential action could replace the order's working definition for executive-branch use. The text of section 1 suggests that the Administration wants a definition built on capability. That would be a substantive change in how U.S. law sorts the federal legal category of AI systems, and if it reaches the statute it would arrive through Congress, where it can be read, debated and amended.
Our working expectation is that federal monitoring will need two vocabularies for a while: “Super Intelligence” in new executive-branch material, and “artificial intelligence” in statutes, existing regulations, contracts, state law and every EU instrument. That split also bears on the convergence of AI policy with the June 2026 U.S. quantum orders, which our Signature Report on Quantum–AI Convergence After the June 2026 U.S. Quantum Orders reads instrument by instrument, at a depth and fixed scope that a free post does not attempt. The question to watch on or about 28 November is whether the draft definition of “Super Intelligence” is narrower than 9401(3), and if it is, which systems it leaves out.
Sources: Executive Office of the President, Executive Order 14434, “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence,” 91 FR 63129–63130 (signed 29 September 2026; published 2 October 2026; FR Doc. 2026-20321); 15 U.S.C. 9401(3), definition of “artificial intelligence” (National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act of 2020); Executive Order 14172, “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness,” 90 FR 8629 (20 January 2025); Executive Order 14347, “Restoring the United States Department of War,” 90 FR 43893 (5 September 2025); NIST, Special Publication 330, The International System of Units (SI); Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (AI Act), Article 3(1); Plain Writing Act of 2010, Pub. L. 111-274; ISO/IEC 22989:2022, Artificial intelligence concepts and terminology; J. McCarthy, M. Minsky, N. Rochester and C. Shannon, “A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence” (31 August 1955). Quentir, Does California’s Executive Order N-9-26 of 18 September 2026 Require an AI Kill Switch?
Published intelligence, built to inform your own decisions. Published: October 2, 2026.