Less than three months after Elon Musk renamed SpaceX’s AI unit, the company is changing names again. That’s the subsidiary that owns X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Musk, on Sunday, posted on X that the company that’s currently known as SpaceXAI will soon be known as SpaceXSI. The move is an embrace of the term “Super Intelligence,” a renaming encouraged by President Donald Trump, who started using the term in late September after polling his social media followers.
Trump signed an executive order a week ago mandating that the term must be used by all departments and agencies in official correspondence, public communications, policy and other documents in the executive branch. “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” will no longer be acknowledged.
Musk, who just over a year ago was in a heated public argument with Trump, fully embraced the SI proposal in a separate post Sunday, writing “No more AI. SI. It’s better”.
Tech moguls get behind Trump
Musk was the latest big name in tech to embrace the SI terminology. Mark Zuckerberg touted the term in a social media post last week. And Jensen Huang, CEO of chip giant Nvidia, which sells the hardware underlying the AI boom, has also embraced it.
The holdout, so far, is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who did not attend a recent gathering of big AI names at the White House. In a post this weekend, he continued to call the technology “AI.”
(It is worth noting that SpaceXAI has yet to update any of its social media accounts to the new name, nor had it made any filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission about a corporate name change. Musk has further remained mum on if SI will replace AI in all official mentions on his platforms — such as the “Made with AI” label found on some posts.)
Trump began ruminating over the renaming of AI as concern about possible existential threats surrounding the technology began to grow. Even Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI giant Anthropic, the maker of Claude, has posited that AI could cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage in the next year.
After Amodei posted an essay calling for a slowdown in AI progress, Trump announced plans to rebrand the technology and summoned AI leaders to the White House to sign a non-binding safety pact. (Trump said the document was “morally binding”).
The name “Super Intelligence” could ultimately be confusing for industry followers, though, as “superintelligence” has been a goal the industry has been chasing for a while. That term has been used to describe a hypothetical future artificial intelligence system that is smarter than humans, perhaps vastly outpacing the human brain’s ability to assess problems and arrive at decisions. If it came to pass, it would be a milestone. Many of the biggest fears about the future of AI have to do with the potential fallout of the advent of superintelligence.
Branding has been a priority for the White House in the second Trump Administration. Beyond relabeling artificial intelligence, Trump, last January, signed an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” and, this August, amidst a trade war with Canada, issued an executive order to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America.
As with the attempt to rename AI, some have gone along with those changes, while others have ignored them.
Chris Morris is a US based veteran journalist with more than 35 years of experience at many of the biggest digital news outlets. In addition to his activities as a writer, reporter and editor, Chris is also a frequent moderator and speaker at major conferences, including CES and South by Southwest.
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