Musk and Zuckerberg Say 'Super Intelligence'. Amazon, Microsoft and Google Still Say 'AI'.

Key points

• Microsoft's 2026 annual report used the phrase "Super Intelligence" eight times, including in CEO Satya Nadella's opening letter to shareholders, even as Nadella used "AI" on his earnings call the same week.
• Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg both avoided the term "artificial intelligence" on their respective Tesla and Meta earnings calls in the week of 20 October 2026.
• Amazon CEO Andy Jassy used the acronym "AI" more than a dozen times in his earnings call opening remarks, as did Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai within seconds of starting his.
• Trump announced the ban on "AI" and "artificial intelligence" in official documents via Truth Social, following a White House AI luncheon on 29 September 2026.

If you watched tech's biggest quarterly earnings calls last week, you got a masterclass in political hedging. The same executives who have spent years telling investors their companies are transforming through artificial intelligence, a term meaning software that learns patterns from data and uses them to make decisions, were now picking and choosing when to say it and when to quietly swap in something else.

The backstory: at a White House AI luncheon on 29 September 2026, President Trump declared that "super intelligence" should replace "artificial intelligence" across the executive branch. He followed up this week with a Truth Social post banning "AI" and "artificial intelligence" from all relevant government documents. As we covered in October, the administration had already launched a "Super Intelligence Force" and pushed NASA to swap the term sitewide, a move NASA's own staff warned would confuse the public.

Now the rebrand is reaching corporate America, with uneven results.

Who switched, and who didn't?

Musk and Zuckerberg went furthest. On Tesla's earnings call, Musk described humanoid robots as not using "any kind of advanced AI or SI," neatly slipping both terms in as equivalents. Zuckerberg on Meta's 21 October call stressed his company's "goal of delivering personal superintelligence to everyone." That phrasing was not entirely new for Meta, which had already created a unit called Meta Superintelligence Labs.

Beyond those two, the compliance was more selective. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna used both "super intelligence" and "AI" in the same breath. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan cited "unprecedented demand for super intelligence" to explain chip shortages. Nvidia's Jensen Huang praised the "White House Accord on Super Intelligence" on X after the September lunch.

But Amazon's Andy Jassy used "AI" more than a dozen times without hesitation. Nadella told his call that one of Microsoft's three priorities is "designing AI to empower people." Alphabet's Sundar Pichai mentioned "AI investments" within seconds of opening his remarks, first reported by CNBC.

What does Microsoft's annual report actually say?

Here's where it gets interesting, and where our coverage can add something the earnings transcripts alone cannot.

Microsoft's 2026 annual report uses "Super Intelligence" eight times, starting with Nadella's very first paragraph to shareholders. He writes that "the central question as we enter this Super Intelligence era" is how to "convert technological progress into economic benefit for everyone, everywhere." The report frames the shift in economic terms too, noting that "inference," the process of actually running an AI model to get an answer, is making the cost-per-query a key metric for customers going forward.

So Nadella says "AI" on a live call and "Super Intelligence" in the formal filing. That is not a contradiction; it is a company threading a needle between a president's preferred vocabulary and the language its customers and investors recognise.

What does this mean for ordinary users?

Practically, nothing changes about how these tools work. The rebrand is a political and marketing argument, not a technical one. Whether your chatbot or email assistant gets labelled "AI" or "SI" in a press release, the underlying technology is the same.

What is worth watching is whether the terminology shift eventually reaches consumer products, help pages and privacy policies. If companies start labelling data-collection practices as "super intelligence features" rather than "AI features," that is the moment ordinary users need to pay attention, because the same data-sharing rules apply no matter what the label says.

The broader pattern, which we have tracked across nine stories on the administration's AI policy since August, is a White House more focused on branding and deregulation than on setting safety standards. The question for the companies still saying "AI" out loud is how long that quiet resistance lasts.

Common questions

Does "super intelligence" mean something different from "artificial intelligence"?

Not in any technical sense currently accepted by researchers. The administration is using the term as a rebranding exercise; the underlying software and its capabilities are unchanged.

Should I be worried about my data if companies start using this new term?

No more than before. Privacy rules and terms of service govern what companies do with your data, not the label they use to describe the technology collecting it. Check those terms as you normally would.