Musk gives in to Trump's term, 'Super Intelligence': the rebrand hides who is really watching AI

By Zendoric · October 5, 2026.

Elon Musk posted on X on Sunday that “Super Intelligence” is a “better” term than “artificial intelligence” and that he will rename SpaceXAI as “SpaceXSI”. In another message, he stated that “SpaceX is a superintelligence company”. Donald Trump did not let the chance pass: he captured the first post and published it without comment on Truth Social, letting the image speak for itself.

That same Sunday, the White House announced the creation of the “Super Intelligence Force” (SIF), a task force led by Jay Clayton, the Director of National Intelligence, thereby made the de facto head of the government's AI policy. According to the founding charter itself cited by Gizmodo, the SIF is to develop “plans to respond to SI-enabled threats” while “avoiding the overregulation and regulatory capture that would stifle innovation and competition”. That second half of the sentence is, in fact, the part that carries the most weight.

The episode caps weeks of linguistic engineering from the White House. As Gizmodo reconstructs it, Trump spent Labor Day posting AI-generated memes —which led a former adviser to tell the New York Times of his concern about the president's mental state—. Days later, after a series of AI-linked cybersecurity incidents, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for a slowdown in the sector's pace of advance. On September 19, Trump announced his intention to rename artificial intelligence; on the 27th he had dinner with Amodei: the following day he had lunch with the rest of the frontier AI leaders in the U.S. and, after that lunch, claimed that they had all signed a non-binding safety pact and had agreed to change the name of their technology to “Super Intelligence”. Musk is, according to the article itself, the first to confirm it explicitly and in full.

Adoption of the term, however, is uneven, and that unevenness is the most revealing part of the episode. Mark Zuckerberg used “superintelligence” (as one word) on the same day as the lunch; Nvidia's Jensen Huang used it the next day in a generic post. On the All-In podcast, David Sacks —the administration's former AI and crypto czar— corrected Jason Calacanis live when he mentioned his own podcast “This Week in AI”, adding: “This Week in Super Intelligence”. Sam Altman, who did not attend the lunch, still uses “AI” unchanged and warned on Saturday that he is uncomfortable with “people trying to attribute a religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models”, calling it “a real safety problem”. This is no small detail: as the article itself recalls, “superintelligence” was born as a theological term, referring to God's plan or to God himself, before being adopted by the AI literature. Altman's remark can be read as a discreet but deliberate objection to the whole exercise.

Our reading is that there are two overlapping stories here and it is worth not confusing them. The first is one of public relations: which word the president and the executives who depend on his regulatory goodwill, his public contracts or his political favor prefer to use. There, the semantic genuflection of Musk, Zuckerberg or Huang says more about Trump's power over the industry than about the real state of the technology. No model has crossed the technical threshold of superintelligence overnight —the ability to surpass humans at practically any cognitive task— because someone changed a label on X. At Zendoric we measure capability with benchmarks (SWE-bench, LMArena, Terminal-Bench, among others), not with press releases: by that yardstick, today's frontier models remain extraordinarily powerful tools, not autonomous superhuman agents. Treating the name change as a story about the technology, and not about the politics of the technology, is the mistake worth avoiding.

The second story, the one that really matters, lies in the fine print of the SIF's charter. A newly created federal body, with a Director of National Intelligence at the helm, is born with the explicit mandate of preventing regulation from “stifling innovation”. That is an industrial policy decision dressed up as risk management, and it comes right after Amodei himself called for slowing the sector's pace because of the safety incidents. The White House's underlying message —accelerate against China, hold back regulation, wrap it all in a grander name— is consistent with the thesis we have been arguing about the geopolitical race: the framing presented as a security narrative usually serves, in practice, to shield the industry from democratic oversight. The short-term risk is not that AI becomes “superintelligent” overnight by decree, but that real oversight ends up subordinated to the narrative of the technology race. That is the tension to watch when the SIF begins to operate, far more than the question of which word each CEO uses to look good on Truth Social.