The rebrand arrived from Washington on the last day of September, and by the next afternoon Gavin Newsom had drafted his reply. The California governor signed an executive order on September 30 directing every state agency and department under his authority to keep using the name “Artificial Intelligence” and its abbreviation “AI,” no matter what the federal government decides to call the technology.
The order, Executive Order N-10-26, is an answer to a Trump executive order issued a day earlier. That order, to the fullest extent the law allows, instructs the federal executive branch to replace “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in official communications, public statements, websites, reports and policy documents. The federal order defines Super Intelligence as the technologies and systems that existing law has described as Artificial Intelligence.
The reach of the Trump order is narrower than a plain reading suggests. It does not rewrite the underlying statutes, which still say Artificial Intelligence. It targets the non-legal materials, the press releases, web pages and briefing documents, through which the public actually meets the government. That is precisely the surface Newsom chose to fight over.
Newsom framed the swap as significant and rejected it anyway. Language and terminology carry real weight, he wrote in the executive order, but changing the name of something does not allow a person of ordinary intelligence to ignore the technology’s already well-documented emerging safety risks, or the unresolved questions about acting on them. A statement from his office the same day said the order is meant to keep California using the name “Artificial Intelligence.”
He put the fight in more personal terms in the announcement. “Super intelligence clearly won’t come from the White House — that’s why California continues to lead,” Newsom said.
The dispute over vocabulary is the newest front in a long argument between Newsom and the Trump administration over who sets the rules for a technology whose most valuable companies sit in California. The state has spent several years positioning itself as the country’s first real regulator of AI, and the governor has been its loudest voice on the subject.
That record is uneven. In September 2024, Newsom vetoed SB 1047, a sweeping AI safety bill that would have required developers of the largest models to test for catastrophic risks and to shoulder liability for severe harm. He called the measure too narrow, aimed at only the biggest models, and warned it would push innovation out of the state. The veto frustrated safety advocates who had wanted California to lead by statute rather than by exhortation.
California has pressed forward since through agency rulemaking rather than headline legislation. The California Privacy Protection Agency has written rules covering how businesses use automated decision-making, and state agencies have begun to regulate the use of AI in hiring, insurance and other areas. None of that work depends on whether the technology is called Artificial Intelligence or Super Intelligence, which is part of why Newsom’s order reads as a defense of a name as much as a defense of a policy.
Newsom and Trump have clashed before, over wildfire aid, immigration policy and the state’s vehicle-emissions rules, and the governor has often used those fights to sharpen his national profile. The AI terminology order fits the same pattern: a state that sees itself as the capital of the industry pushing back on a federal effort to reframe it. Whether the phrase “Super Intelligence” catches on will depend less on either executive order than on which name the companies, universities and workers in the state keep using day to day.
The label swap also collides with the way researchers use the term. In the field, “superintelligence” describes a hypothetical machine that surpasses human intelligence across the board, something that does not exist. Applying the label to the pattern-matching systems that power today’s chatbots and image generators blurs the line between what is deployed now and what remains a research goal. The blurring is not incidental to the name; it is, in effect, the name’s purpose.
California’s size gives the order more than symbolic reach. The state’s economy is the largest of any U.S. state and would rank among the largest in the world, and its agencies buy enormous quantities of software. The companies that sell AI tools to the state will keep the words “Artificial Intelligence” in their contracts because the state will keep them in its paperwork, whatever Washington prints on its websites.
Inside the federal government, the change will not be instantaneous. Agencies will have to revise style guides, templates and thousands of pages of published material, a job that takes months and tends to produce exactly the kind of inconsistency the order is meant to remove. Newsom’s order, by contrast, asks California agencies to do nothing at all, which may be its quietest advantage.
Newsom’s order changes no state law and touches no federal statute. It is a statement of vocabulary, backed by the governor’s pen. In a fight over definitions, his office has concluded, vocabulary is where the fight is.
