In Washington last week, an executive order quietly did something that years of marketing campaigns never managed: it changed what the most powerful companies on Earth call their core product. President Donald Trump declared that government agencies must stop saying "artificial intelligence" and start saying "super intelligence" instead, warning that anyone who clung to the old phrase would be treated as "THE ENEMY." Within hours, some of the richest men in California were rewriting their company names. Elon Musk moved first, promising to rechristen SpaceXAI as SpaceXSI.

Marc Benioff followed, announcing that Salesforce's AIForce product would become SIForce. Nvidia's Jensen Huang, who sat beside Trump at the summit where the order was unveiled and has publicly argued that fears about AI's dangers are overstated, revealed that his company would put $1 billion toward "super intelligence research." Now Microsoft's Satya Nadella has joined them, using the new term repeatedly in a post this week that, strangely, also called for an "emergency brake" on the very technology he was renaming. What makes this rebrand curious is not the words themselves, but what they reveal about power in the tech industry.

A decade ago, researchers in Toronto, Beijing and London argued over whether "artificial intelligence" was even the right phrase for pattern-matching software. Today, in Washington and Menlo Park, the debate is not about accuracy but allegiance. Huang, who has billions riding on continued White House goodwill for chip exports to Asia, has particular reason to be agreeable. Whether ordinary users abroad — in São Paulo, Lagos or Seoul — ever adopt "super intelligence" is another matter entirely.

Language, unlike a corporate press release, is rarely rebranded by decree.