What the memo says
The directive comes from acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter, issued Tuesday October 6, according to a memo seen by Reuters. It follows President Trump's executive order 14434, signed September 29, mandating the terminology switch across federal agencies. The stated reasoning: "super intelligence" more accurately reflects the potential of the technology American labs are building.
DOJ staff must use "super intelligence" and "SI" instead of AI in public communications, policy documents, and other official records. The directive, per the memo, "shall extend to court filings when appropriate."
The escape clause does the real work
"To the maximum extent permitted by law" is an admission, not a boast. Federal statutes say "artificial intelligence." An executive order cannot rewrite them, so wherever the law itself uses the old term, the old term stays. The White House order itself treats "super intelligence" as covering technologies already included under federal AI law. Nothing is being reclassified. Everything is being relabeled.
The 60-day clock for a formal definition is the part that could matter later: officials must propose a definition, and that definition could eventually change how federal laws refer to the technology. Until then, agencies have a new word, not a new standard. Definitions drafted under branding deadlines tend to be political before they are technical.
A prosecutor's vocabulary problem
The DOJ is not a random agency for this exercise. It is the office that would prosecute AI-related crime, police fraud built with AI tools, and, in the administration's own telling, "rein in" the technology if things go wrong. Public trust in AI has soured after a string of hacking incidents, and the response is a rebrand. The thing the public fears gets a grander name, mandated from above.
Note the hedge in the court-filing clause — "when appropriate." Lawyers will decide, filing by filing, whether the new term survives contact with a judge who expects the vocabulary the statutes actually use. The rename lives or dies in the footnotes of real cases, and in each one the controlling text still says artificial intelligence.
The bottom line
Rename the thing and you haven't regulated the thing. If the administration wanted to change how the technology is governed, it would be writing rules, not synonyms. The most honest sentence in the whole directive is the escape clause. Even the memo admits the law is unchanged.
Sources
- [1] Reuters — “US Justice Dept tells staff to call AI 'super intelligence' under Trump order” (Oct 6, 2026)Read source
- [2] Analytics Insight — “US Justice Department Tells Staff to Replace AI With Super Intelligence”Read source