Trump Orders Diplomats to Drop “AI” for “SI”

It's a new term, straight from the podium. President Trump used his address to the U.N. General Assembly this week to announce something unexpected — he doesn't like the term "artificial intelligence" anymore, and he's changing it. "The use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake; it makes it sound fake, and it is not fake," Trump told the assembled world leaders. "It's actually amazing."

His replacement: "super intelligence," or SI for short.

The Memo That Made It Official

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Within a day, the change had already trickled down into federal bureaucracy. Michael Drager, deputy assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of International Organization Affairs, sent an email to staff Tuesday titled "Change in Nomenclature AI to SI." The instructions were direct: "Please change all references of 'Artificial Intelligence' to 'Super Intelligence' in our documents and positions. We will be using 'SI' in all remarks, positions and press elements moving forward."

That bureau oversees every U.S. diplomatic mission connected to the United Nations and other multilateral agencies worldwide — meaning American diplomats speaking with foreign counterparts are now expected to drop a term used globally for decades in favor of the president's preferred phrasing.

It's not yet clear whether other State Department bureaus, or federal agencies beyond State, will follow the same directive.

What This Means Beyond Washington, D.C.

Language shifts like this tend to feel abstract until they show up somewhere unexpected — a trade agreement, a tech policy briefing, a federal grant application that suddenly needs updated wording. Washington is home to some of the country's largest AI research operations and cloud computing infrastructure, so terminology used in official U.S. government communication carries real weight here. It shapes how contracts get written and how companies in the state describe their own work to federal partners.

For now, one bureau, one memo, and one presidential preference are working their way through the diplomatic corps. Whether "super intelligence" catches on more broadly—in Washington, D.C., or here in Washington state—remains an open question.