Washington Renamed AI and Kept the Definition

An executive order signed September 29 directs the executive branch to stop saying “AI” and start saying “SI” — while Section 3(a) keeps the statutory definition at 15 U.S.C. 9401(3) exactly as written.

This is an executive order governing non-statutory documents inside the executive branch. It is not a statute, and it does not change the law: Section 3(a) keeps the existing statutory definition of artificial intelligence at 15 U.S.C. 9401(3) until a later Presidential action or an Act of Congress says otherwise. A separate voluntary commitment was reported signed the same day. Its text is on neither White House page read for this piece, so none of its contents are described here and no signatory is named. Nothing here is investment advice.

What Happened

On September 29, 2026, the White House published an executive order titled Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence. Its core instruction, in Section 2(a), is that 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 ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI’ in any applicable setting,” to the maximum extent permitted by law.

That instruction applies to official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents, and other non-statutory documents within the executive branch. It took effect on signature.

What did not change is the legal perimeter of what is being governed. Section 3(a) of the order reads: “the terms ‘Super Intelligence’ and ‘SI’ mean the technologies and systems encompassed by the term ‘artificial intelligence’ as defined in section 9401(3) of title 15, United States Code.” The scope of what is covered does not move. The word moves. The rationale offered in Section 1 is that today’s systems “do much more than imitate or automate discrete aspects of human intelligence” and “increasingly represent not merely artificial intelligence, but a new era of Super Intelligence.”

The order also carves out what it does not touch. Section 2(b) states that nothing in Section 2 requires the alteration of “previously issued regulations, Presidential actions, contracts, grants, or other historical documents.” Section 4(c) further specifies that the order “is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States.” The same-day fact sheet, sourced from the same whitehouse.gov pages, already writes in the new vocabulary about prior policies — referring to them as “SI policies” and noting that America’s AI Action Plan identified actions “to win the SI race” — while its own related links still carry those documents under their original AI titles.

The Structural Read

The Permission Layer framework is the right lens here. In the Map of AI, the Permission Layer is where government determines which technologies ship, under what names, and under what legal conditions. What the September 29 order does is move one lever in that layer — the vocabulary lever — while explicitly leaving the definitional lever to a future process. That is not a criticism of the instrument; it is a description of how it is built.

Executive orders operate within a specific constraint set. What a president can do unilaterally — directing how executive-branch agencies write their own documents — can be done on signature. What requires statutory change cannot be done by executive order alone. The design of this order is a direct expression of that constraint: it does what it can immediately and schedules the rest. The 60-day clock attached to the APST proposal is not a deadline for a new definition to take effect.

It is a deadline for a proposal about whether and how a definition might change, to be submitted to the President. That is a materially different thing.

The fact sheet’s behavior is a useful case study in what a non-statutory rename looks like in practice. It writes in the new vocabulary — “SI policies,” “win the SI race” — about documents that still carry their original AI titles and live under a navigation that still reads AI.Gov. Section 2(b) expressly permits exactly this: historical documents do not have to be changed. The result is a live picture of two vocabularies coexisting inside the same government communication, which is precisely what the carve-out was designed to allow.

What follows from the text

Section 2(b)’s carve-out for regulations, Presidential actions, contracts, grants and other historical documents leaves the executive branch holding two vocabularies at once. New communications use SI; existing legal instruments use AI. The order supplies the policy direction and does not supply guidance on how agencies should handle references that appear in statute or in pre-existing agreements.

Section 3(b) asks the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology to assess whether the legal definition should “modify, expand upon, or otherwise supersede” 15 U.S.C. 9401(3), and to recommend any conforming amendments and any additional Presidential or executive action. That proposal is due to the President within 60 days. What it contains is not established by anything in the order or the fact sheet.

The voluntary commitment reported signed the same day is a separate instrument carrying different legal weight. Its text appears on neither of the two White House pages read for this piece — not on the executive order page and not on the fact sheet. Because this publication reads instruments before characterising them, nothing about its provisions, its signatories or its oversight arrangements is described here.

The structural point stands on its own: an executive order binds executive-branch practice through the chain of command, and a voluntary commitment does not. Treating the two as one policy instrument would overstate both.

The Bottom Line

The executive order signed September 29 is precisely as large as Section 3(a) makes it and no larger: it is a vocabulary change with a definitional deferral attached, applied to non-statutory executive-branch documents, with an explicit carve-out for everything already written. The word changes today; the legal scope of what the word covers stays at 15 U.S.C. 9401(3) until a future Presidential action or an Act of Congress says otherwise. The APST has 60