Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
Trump's 'Super Intelligence' order still defines the term by the old AI statute
Trump ordered the executive branch to call AI 'Super Intelligence' while keeping its legal meaning tied to the existing statute, 15 U.S.C. 9401(3). Any new definition would arrive as a legislative proposal, and the safety accord signed the same day leaves oversight to the companies.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- The White House's top science and technology adviser must propose legislation for a new federal definition by November 28, 60 days out.
- The rename covers correspondence, websites, reports and policy documents, and previously issued regulations, contracts and grants do not need to be altered.
- On the same day, Trump and the heads of Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI and Nvidia signed a voluntary White House Accord on Super Intelligence.
- Microsoft and Amazon, two of the seven companies that made voluntary AI commitments to the Biden White House in 2023, did not sign the new accord.
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Why it matters
- constraint Until Congress rewrites 9401(3), agencies keep applying the old coverage test, so the rename alone does not bring any system under federal scrutiny or take one out.
- decision Contractors bidding for federal work have to decide for themselves whether to relabel proposals, solicitation responses and product documentation, because the order leaves those documents unaddressed.
- precedent The signatories push codification off to some later date, so any future federal rule on frontier oversight would start from an audit design the regulated companies wrote themselves.
The order's case for the new name is an empirical one. Current systems, it says, "far exceed what was envisioned when the term 'Artificial Intelligence' first came into use" [3]. What it prescribes is a change of vocabulary, and the operative sentence includes its own hedge: "It is therefore the policy of my Administration that, to the maximum extent permitted by law, the executive branch shall use the terms 'Super Intelligence' and 'SI' in place of 'Artificial Intelligence' and 'AI'," Trump wrote [2].
The executive branch "will not acknowledge" the older terms [17]. Section 3 still depends on them. It defines Super Intelligence as the technologies and systems already covered by the statutory definition of artificial intelligence [4], so federal law reaches exactly the same systems before and after the rename.
I think the only document in this package that could change that is the proposal due in November. It must weigh whether a new definition should modify, expand upon or supersede the statute, and it must propose amendments to existing laws that reference AI [6]. It also has to capture systems that, in the order's words, do "much more than imitate or automate discrete aspects of human intelligence" [16]. That phrase describes a capability without a threshold. The thing this doesn't tell you is how an agency would test a given model against it before writing the definition into a grant or a contract.
The accord signed the same day has a similar gap between design and measurement. Three of its four layers sit inside the company being checked: the capability monitoring, the verification team and the board committee [1]. The fourth, an independent external auditor or evaluator, is the only outside check. Outsiders cannot compare pass rates across firms or over time when results go only to the company that commissioned the evaluation. The accord does not name auditors, set deadlines or require companies to disclose audit findings to customers or regulators [13].
The new name doesn't reach far into the accord either. The signatories wrote that frontier developers need "robust internal processes and controls" [18]. Each commitment refers to "frontier models", and the term "Super Intelligence" appears only in the title [15].
What to watch
- Whether the adviser's November 28 proposal recommends modifying, expanding or superseding 9401(3), and whether it sets a capability threshold an agency could actually test against.
- Whether any accord signatory names its external auditor or publishes findings to customers or regulators.
- Whether Microsoft and Amazon sign the accord, or agencies issue guidance on vendor documents that still say 'AI'.