EO 14434 Orders Agencies to Say Super Intelligence Not AI
The Federal Register on 2 October 2026 published Executive Order 14434 directing agencies to use Super Intelligence and SI instead of Artificial Intelligence and AI in non-statutory documents.
PromptCrates Editorial
Staff Writer
The Federal Register on Friday, 2 October 2026, published Executive Order 14434, “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence,” directing executive departments and agencies to use the terms “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in place of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” in official non-statutory documents, according to Federal Register document 2026-20321, which appears at 91 FR 63129. The order was signed on 29 September 2026 and is also posted as a White House presidential action with a PDF of Executive Order 14434. It is terminology policy with implementation deadlines, not a new technical safety standard.
What the order requires of agencies
Section 1 argues that frontier systems increasingly amplify human ingenuity beyond what the mid-twentieth-century phrase “artificial intelligence” captured, and therefore federal terminology should reflect a “new era of Super Intelligence.” To the maximum extent permitted by law, agencies must use Super Intelligence and SI in correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents, and other non-statutory executive-branch materials. The order also states the administration will not acknowledge usage of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” in applicable settings—an unusual phrasing that will force communicators to rewrite templates, glossaries, and web copy.
Section 2 clarifies that nothing requires altering previously issued regulations, Presidential actions, contracts, grants, or other historical documents. That carve-out matters for procurement shops and inspectors general: old statements of work that say “AI” do not automatically become defective, but new memos and landing pages are expected to switch. Section 3 defines Super Intelligence and SI, for purposes of the order and except where law provides otherwise, as the technologies encompassed by “artificial intelligence” in 15 U.S.C. 9401(3). In other words, the legal referent stays the existing statutory AI definition until Congress or later Presidential action changes it.
Within sixty days, the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology must submit proposed legislative language for a federal definition of Super Intelligence and SI, including whether that definition should modify or supersede the statutory AI definition, any conforming amendments to statutes that say AI, and recommendations for further executive action. Publication costs are assigned to the Office of Science and Technology Policy. General provisions preserve agency authorities and OMB budget functions and disclaim private rights of action.
How this differs from voluntary industry accords
PromptCrates previously covered the separate White House Accord on Super Intelligence, a voluntary industry pledge on audits and board oversight. EO 14434 is a different instrument: it renames how the executive branch talks, and it tees up statutory definition work, but it does not itself mandate third-party audits, model evaluations, or incident reporting. Readers should keep the Accord and the Order distinct when briefing counsel or boards. Related oversight pressure continues on a separate track, including the FTC probe into OpenAI and Anthropic over agent harms.
Practically, agencies that already published AI strategies, playbooks, and RMF mappings face a brand-and-search problem. External stakeholders searching for “AI” guidance may miss pages retitled around SI unless redirects and dual indexing are planned. International counterparts and standards bodies still say AI; federal staff will need bilingual glossaries for NIST, OECD, and EU conversations even if domestic non-statutory prose switches. Contractors writing proposals should ask contracting officers whether solicitations issued after the order will reject “AI” wording or merely prefer SI.
Compliance checklist for federal vendors
Vendors and labs that sell to the U.S. government should update style guides for new white papers, websites, and briefings aimed at executive-branch audiences, while leaving statutory citations and historical contract language intact. They should calendar the sixty-day APST legislative proposal and watch whether Congress treats SI as a synonym, a subset, or a broader category than AI. They should also document how product marketing that still says AI maps to SI in federal decks to avoid apparent inconsistency during source selection.
Civil-society and industry critics will ask whether renaming is a substitute for enforceable safety rules. The Order’s own text leaves room for later codification and does not repeal existing consumer-protection or national-security authorities. Until the APST package lands, the durable facts are narrower: a published EO, a terminology mandate for non-statutory executive communications, a preserved statutory AI definition as the interim referent, and a sixty-day clock for proposed legislative language. PromptCrates will treat SI terminology changes as policy process news, not as evidence that model capabilities crossed a scientific threshold on the signing date.
Records managers face a quieter burden. Websites, press offices, and program dashboards that currently say AI will need controlled vocabularies, redirects, and search synonyms so historians and journalists can still find materials after titles flip to SI. Training decks for new career staff should explain that SI in this executive-branch sense is a terminology overlay on the existing statutory AI definition, not a claim that every chatbot suddenly meets a sci-fi threshold. Misreading the Order as a capability announcement would confuse oversight hearings and budget justifications alike.
State and local partners are not bound by the Order, which applies to the federal executive branch. Grants and cooperative agreements may still arrive with SI language from federal program offices while state statutes and university policies continue to say AI. Recipients should ask for dual-label glossaries in notice-of-funding opportunities to avoid proposal disqualification over synonyms. International agreements and standards texts will likewise keep AI nomenclature for years; U.S. negotiators will need explicit translation tables when EO style meets ISO or OECD drafts.
Primary sources for this article: Federal Register document 2026-20321 (91 FR 63129), published on 2 October 2026, and the White House presidential action page and PDF of Executive Order 14434, signed on 29 September 2026, including sections on purpose, implementation, definition, the sixty-day APST mandate, and general provisions.
