Trump signed an executive order Tuesday telling the federal government to stop saying “artificial intelligence” and start saying super intelligence, or SI. The order came hours after leaders from the biggest tech companies met with him at the White House and signed a voluntary accord on how they will develop the technology.
“We’ve changed the name officially to SI,” Trump said at the meeting, spelling out that the S stands for “super.”
According to the White House, the order directs every federal department and agency to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in official letters, public statements and policy documents, and to stop recognizing the terms “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” altogether. The White House argues that “artificial” makes the technology sound like it only copies human thinking, while super intelligence captures what it can actually do. The change does not force the government to rewrite old regulations, contracts, grants or historical records, and it has no power over what companies or regular people call it.
Trump had been building up to this for weeks. He ran a poll on Truth Social earlier this month asking about a new name, and last week at the United Nations General Assembly he publicly called for dropping the term “artificial intelligence.” Some of the tech leaders in the room seemed ready to play along. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the data centers his industry is building are really “SI factories, super intelligence factories,” and Elon Musk reposted a clip from the meeting with the caption “Super Intelligence.”
The super intelligence order is the newest entry in a long list of renames since Trump returned to office. Here is every one of them.
It started on his first day back. On January 20, 2025, Trump signed an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Google Maps changed the label for American users, but Mexico and most of the world still call it the Gulf of Mexico, and outlets including the Associated Press kept the original name because the gulf is international water.
That same order changed Denali, the tallest mountain in North America, back to Mount McKinley. Barack Obama had restored the Alaska Native name Denali in 2015. Trump switched it back to honor William McKinley, the 25th president, though the national park around the mountain kept the name Denali National Park and Preserve.
Next came Fort Bragg. The North Carolina Army base was named for Confederate General Braxton Bragg until 2023, when it became Fort Liberty as part of the push to strip Confederate names from military bases. Trump’s Pentagon changed it back to Fort Bragg, but this time officially named it for Private First Class Roland Bragg, a World War II soldier. The name went back up without technically honoring the Confederate general again.
In May 2025, Trump announced he was renaming Veterans Day, November 11, as “Victory Day for World War I.” Veterans Day marks the end of the fighting in World War I and honors everyone who has served. Trump declared the new name, but the federal holiday is still Veterans Day on the calendar.
The U.S. Institute of Peace, a Washington agency Congress created to work on ending conflicts, got his name too. The State Department added Trump’s name to the institute last year, making it the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, even though his administration had tried to shut the agency down. Former institute officials who were pushed out are now in court trying to stop crews from putting his name on the outside of the building.
In September 2025, Trump signed an order to rename the Department of Defense the Department of War. The Pentagon had not used that name since 1947, when Harry Truman reorganized the military after World War II. Trump said the old name “had a stronger sound.” The catch is that only Congress can legally rename a federal department, so the order made Department of War a “secondary title,” meaning an extra name the Pentagon is allowed to use. It also let Pete Hegseth call himself secretary of war.
The Kennedy Center fight went the furthest and ended the worst for Trump. In December 2025, a board of trustees Trump handpicked voted to rename the Washington performing arts center The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, and workers added his name to the building the next day. Congress created the center by law as the official memorial to John F. Kennedy, and Ohio Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, who sits on the board, sued. A federal judge ruled in May that the board had no authority to rename the building and ordered Trump’s name taken down by June 12. Crews removed it, an appeals court refused to put it back, and a judge blocked another attempt to restore it this month. Minutes after that ruling, the board voted to close the center.
Then came Lake Ontario. On August 27, 2026, in the middle of a trade war with Canada, Trump signed an order renaming it Lake America “effective immediately.” The order told the Interior Department to change the name in the federal government’s official database of place names. About 55 percent of the lake’s surface sits in Canada, and the province of Ontario is named after it. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said the lake’s name is older than the Declaration of Independence and that Canadians will keep calling it Lake Ontario, and Ontario Premier Doug Ford put up a giant “Lake Ontario” sign in response.
That makes super intelligence the ninth major rename of Trump’s second term. Like the Gulf of America and Lake America, the SI order only controls what the federal government says. Tech companies, schools and everyday people can keep saying AI.
