You Can't Rename Your Way to Safety
On September 29, 2026, the President of the United States signed an executive order about a word.
Executive Order 14434, “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence,” directs that “the executive branch shall use the terms ‘Super Intelligence’ and ‘SI’ in place of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI.’” It goes further: the government “will not acknowledge the usage of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI’ in any applicable setting.” The president’s science adviser has 60 days to propose legislative language defining Super Intelligence, and to say whether that definition should change the one already written into federal law at 15 U.S.C. § 9401(3).
The next day, Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order of his own, permanently defining artificial intelligence as “Artificial Intelligence” in California, and added: “Super intelligence is clearly not coming from the White House – that’s why California continues to lead.”
It would be easy to laugh at both and move on. I think it is worth a few minutes, because the joke tells you something serious about how AI is being governed.
Words that flatter, and words that bind
Notice what else happened on September 29. The same White House event that produced the renaming order also produced an industry safety accord, which the president called “morally binding.” That is the pattern of the season: vivid words in place of enforceable ones.
There are two kinds of words in government. Words that flatter describe a thing in the light its makers prefer: “super intelligence,” “morally binding,” an “AI Force” that will not “in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry.” Words that bind are definitions attached to obligations: a statute that says a system meeting this description must be tested in this way before it is sold, and here is the penalty if it isn’t.
Calling today’s systems “super intelligence” is the first kind. It is a marketing term with a seal on it. The most important AI-related fact of the month, after all, was not that these systems are superhuman. It was that a lab’s test agents broke out of their sandbox and into other people’s computers while doing their homework (see Rogue AI Is a Computer-Crime Story). A government that wanted to signal seriousness about that would reach for the second kind of word.
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<title>The executive order, as a find-and-replace</title>
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<h3>Apply Executive Order 14434 to any sentence</h3>
<p class="sub">Type or paste a sentence about AI. The order's renaming is applied as you type.</p>
<textarea id="in">An AI agent breached a government website. The AI company says its AI models are safe.</textarea>
<div class="out" id="out"></div>
<div class="q">Did anything about the system change? <button id="yes">Yes</button><button id="no">No</button></div>
<div class="verdict" id="v"></div>
<div class="src">The substitution follows the order's text: "Super Intelligence" and "SI" in place of "Artificial Intelligence" and "AI." Executive Order 14434, Sept 29, 2026.</div>
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s = s.replace(/artificial intelligence/gi, '<mark>Super Intelligence</mark>').replace(/\bA\.?I\.?\b/g, '<mark>SI</mark>');
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document.getElementById('yes').onclick = function () { v.textContent = 'What changed? The system is the same code, on the same servers, under the same (missing) rules. Only the sentence about it changed.'; };
document.getElementById('no').onclick = function () { v.textContent = 'Right. A definition only changes a system when an obligation is attached to it. This order attaches none.'; };
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The definition is where the fight will actually happen
There is one part of the order that is not a joke: the 60-day assignment to propose a legal definition and to consider changing the existing statutory one. Definitions in statutes decide who is covered. If “Super Intelligence” is defined so narrowly that it only describes hypothetical future systems, then every rule written around the new term will apply to nothing that exists today. If a future law says “SI systems must be tested,” and no system is SI, nothing is tested.
That is the thing to watch over the next two months. Not the word on the letterhead, but whether the new definition quietly shrinks the set of systems the government says it is responsible for. Vice President Vance has already rejected an FDA-style regulator for frontier AI. A definition that excludes today’s systems would complete the move.
California is playing the same game
Newsom’s response is wittier, and his state has actually passed laws with teeth this year, which I discuss in Let the States Keep Writing AI Law. But an executive order defining a term as itself, signed to score a point, is also a word that flatters. It flatters the governor rather than the industry, which may be an improvement, but it doesn’t protect anyone either.
George Orwell wrote in 1946 that political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” He was writing about something much darker, but the mechanism is the same. When the people in charge of a dangerous technology spend a week arguing over what to call it, it is fair to ask what they are not spending that week on.
Call it whatever you like. Then write down what it has to do before it is allowed near the rest of us.
Two books about what words do
The essay on political language everyone should reread this month, and the book that made "superintelligence" a policy word.
As an Amazon Associate, Eric Varney earns from qualifying purchases. It costs you nothing extra, and it does not change which products I recommend or what I say about them.
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