NASA Is Replacing Every Mention of 'AI' With 'Super Intelligence', and Its Own Staff Say It Will Confuse the World

Key points

• President Trump signed an executive order titled "Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence" on September 29, 2026, directing all federal agencies to replace "artificial intelligence" and "AI" with "super intelligence" and "SI" in official communications.
• NASA's Office of Communications and Office of the Chief Information Officer issued a four-phase internal implementation schedule running through December 2026.
• The order keeps the existing federal definition of AI unchanged, meaning no technology has to demonstrate new capabilities to be relabelled "super intelligence."
• At least one planned technical update inside NASA has been described internally as a "breaking change" that will disrupt existing software integrations used by researchers.
• NASA employees have been told not to acknowledge the old terminology at all, even in transitional phrases like "SI, formerly known as AI."

Somewhere inside NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the team that writes software for Mars rovers now has a new item on its to-do list: find every instance of the letters "AI" in official documentation and swap them for "SI."

That is not a metaphor. It is a line item in a real schedule.

On September 29, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order titled "Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence." The order tells every federal agency to stop using "artificial intelligence" and "AI" in all official communications, replacing them with "super intelligence" and "SI." The White House argues that today's AI systems do far more than automate simple tasks, and that the language should reflect that.

The order does not change what counts as AI. It keeps the existing federal definition word for word. A chatbot that was AI last month is now "super intelligence" this month, having done nothing new to earn the title.

What does this actually mean for NASA?

It means a lot of editing, and at least one serious technical headache. Internal documents obtained by Space.com show NASA's communications and IT teams working through a four-phase plan that stretches to December. The changes cover websites, publications, style guides, presentations, media interviews and contractor IT systems.

Staff have been told to make the switch effective immediately, with no transitional language. Saying "SI, also known as AI" is not permitted.

One planned update has been flagged inside the agency as a "breaking change," meaning it will snap the connections between NASA systems and external software tools that researchers already use. Scientists who have built workflows on top of NASA's data platforms may find things stop working without warning.

None of the underlying technologies are changing. We covered the administration's earlier move to strip states of AI oversight power in our story on how David Sacks shaped that executive order on 23 September, and this rename follows the same pattern: policy language shifts while the engineering stays put. That makes the disruption here purely administrative, which is exactly what some NASA employees find so frustrating.

"Super intelligence and artificial intelligence, they have two different meanings. They both are already separate things," one participant in an internal NASA communications meeting said. "Super intelligence" already has a specific meaning in computer science: a hypothetical system that surpasses human intelligence across every domain. Applying it to basic data-sorting models risks real confusion in the scientific literature.

"We're not even supposed to use AI as a term," one NASA employee told Space.com under anonymity. "It's being talked about like Voldemort or Macbeth, with people calling it 'the technology that must not be named.'" That employee also flagged concern that confusion will spread well beyond NASA's walls into the broader scientific community.

Who is driving this inside NASA?

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman is. He attended a White House luncheon with tech executives on September 29, the same day Trump signed the order, and by October 1 he was already using the new terminology publicly at a press conference. One NASA employee told Space.com that staff are "getting a lot of pressure from the administrator himself" to move fast.

Isaacman is not a traditional NASA chief. He founded Shift4 Payments, a payment-processing company, and later funded two private spaceflight missions with SpaceX before taking the administrator role in December 2025. His alignment with the current administration's agenda has been consistent since day one.

The specific technical terms that built most of NASA's AI systems, including "machine learning" (the statistical technique of training computers to find patterns in data), "large language models" (the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT) and "chatbot," remain acceptable under the new rules. Those exceptions apply mainly inside technical documents, not in anything public-facing.

For researchers and members of the public trying to follow NASA's work, the practical upshot is this: when you see NASA write "super intelligence" or "SI" in an official document, it means what you used to call artificial intelligence or AI. The science hasn't moved. The label has, and so far the biggest casualty is clarity.