State Department cable orders staff to write super intelligence instead of AI

What the State Department cable says

The US State Department has told its staff to stop writing "artificial intelligence" in official work and to write "Super Intelligence" instead. The instruction is in an unclassified, department-wide cable dated Monday 19 October, which Nextgov/FCW and Government Executive reported on 20 October after obtaining it and speaking with two people familiar with the matter. The cable has not been published by the department, so its contents here come from that report.

According to the report, the cable tells employees to use "Super Intelligence", or "SI", in new letters, emails, public messages, websites, reports, remarks and policy documents, subject to legal exceptions. Existing material is to be updated the next time staff revise it rather than in a single sweep.

The cable goes beyond everyday prose. Nextgov quotes it as saying: "All official titles and the names of Department governance bodies, systems, platforms, inventories, and programs must use SI in place of AI." That means internal offices, software platforms and the department's inventories of AI use cases are meant to be renamed, not just the wording of new press releases.

Nextgov says administration officials had discussed the change with some State bureaus in recent weeks, and that the Associated Press had earlier reported such contacts with the bureau that handles international organizations. The cable appears to be the first organization-wide directive spelling out where the new language must be used.

Where the new wording applies

The scope described in the report is broad. The new term is meant for anything the department writes itself: correspondence with other agencies, statements to the public, website copy, internal reports, speeches and talking points, and policy papers that diplomats use in negotiations. Official job titles that contain AI are also covered, as are the names of committees, boards and working groups.

One program has already been renamed. The cable says the American AI Exports Program is now the American SI Exports Program, citing an earlier State Department cable. The program's public website, siexports.gov, already uses the new name. It describes itself as "the national accelerator for Super Intelligence (SI) business opportunities" and offers designated industry consortia priority export licensing at the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, US government advocacy with foreign officials, and help routing financing requests, all framed around selling "full-stack SI solutions" abroad.

The cable also tells staff where not to apply the swap. Foreign bodies keep their own names. Nextgov says the cable specifically instructs employees not to change references to China's World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, even as the department replaces the term in its own materials. In practice, a single memo could therefore say SI when describing US policy and artificial intelligence when naming a Chinese or multilateral institution.

What stays the same

Several categories of text are exempt, according to the report. Employees must preserve language required by law and existing legal citations, including quotations from statutes, regulations, treaties and other legal instruments. Contracts and grants are excluded for now, pending further guidance.

The department is not rewriting its archive either. Previously published documents, cables and archived web pages should not be revised or reissued solely to change the terminology. The published titles of existing presidential actions, programs and organizations stay as they are unless the department says otherwise, and Nextgov gives America's AI Action Plan as an example of a title that keeps its original wording.

For staff working on international agreements or departmental rules, the cable directs questions about terminology to the relevant policy or legal office. That matters because treaty texts and joint statements are negotiated with other governments, which are not bound by a US executive order and may not accept the new term.

The executive order behind it

The cable implements Executive Order 14434, Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence, which President Trump signed on 29 September 2026. The order says it is the policy of the administration that, "to the maximum extent permitted by law," the executive branch "shall use the terms 'Super Intelligence' and 'SI' in place of 'Artificial Intelligence' and 'AI' and will not acknowledge the usage of 'Artificial Intelligence' and 'AI' in any applicable setting."

Section 2 of the order applies that to "official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents, and other non-statutory documents within the executive branch," and says nothing in it requires changes to previously issued regulations, presidential actions, contracts, grants or historical documents. The State Department's exemptions follow that template closely.

The order does not change what the technology is. Section 3 defines Super Intelligence as the technologies and systems already covered by the statutory definition of artificial intelligence in 15 U.S.C. 9401(3). It also gives the president's science adviser 60 days to propose legislative language for a federal definition of Super Intelligence, including whether it should replace the existing definition of artificial intelligence and what conforming amendments Congress would need to make. That deadline falls at the end of November.

As Nextgov notes, in computer science "superintelligence" usually means a hypothetical system that far exceeds human intelligence across most fields, which is different from the generative AI tools in use today. Under the order, the new label covers today's systems as they are.

Super intelligence is spreading across government

The State Department is not the first agency to adopt the vocabulary in public. Nextgov reports that National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross repeatedly referred to AI as "super intelligence" and "SI" during a 1 October discussion on AI safety, and that Office of Personnel Management chief information officer Adam Starr used "SI" last week while describing an OPM SuperIntelligence Governance and Adoption Program, or SI GAP, meant to help other agencies adopt the technology.

The push has also gone abroad, with mixed results. Before the International Monetary Fund's October meetings, the US Treasury lobbied for the IMF to adopt super intelligence. As AI Lookout reported, the IMF steering committee's 17 October statement used neither that term nor artificial intelligence, settling on "advanced intelligence technologies" instead.

The State Department has its own history with the new branding. Earlier this month it was the department named in reporting on a Super Intelligence Force statement and visa forms filed by a testing model, and the White House has packaged its research push under the Genesis Mission, with $2.4 billion in listed industry compute credits. The cable is the clearest sign so far of how the label is meant to work inside a large department day to day.

Why a word change matters for diplomacy

For most people, the word on a State Department press release changes nothing about how chatbots or models work. The practical effects are in the places where wording carries weight. Diplomats negotiate communiques, memorandums of understanding and technology partnerships, and the cable means US drafts will now arrive with SI where partners are used to AI. Other governments can accept, ignore or negotiate around the term, as the IMF members did.

Inside government, renaming systems, platforms and inventories is not free. Every AI governance board, use-case inventory and internal tool that carries the old name becomes a renaming task the next time it is touched. The exemption for contracts and grants means procurement paperwork will keep saying artificial intelligence for now, so officials may work with two vocabularies at once until further guidance arrives.

There is also a search problem for outsiders. Researchers, journalists and companies tracking US technology policy have relied on the phrase artificial intelligence to find relevant documents. New State Department material will increasingly say SI, while archived material, legal citations and foreign organizations keep AI, so anyone monitoring the department will need to search for both.

What to keep in mind

The cable itself is not public. Everything about its wording comes from Nextgov/FCW and Government Executive, which say they obtained it and spoke to two people familiar with the matter. AI Lookout has not seen the document, and the State Department had not published it or commented on it on its own website when this article was written.

The change is a matter of terminology, not capability. Under Executive Order 14434, "Super Intelligence" means exactly what "artificial intelligence" meant in US law before. Whether that changes depends on the legislative proposal due at the end of November and on Congress, which would have to pass any new statutory definition.

The next things to watch are whether other large departments issue similar department-wide guidance, whether the State Department publishes renamed governance bodies or use-case inventories, and how foreign partners handle the term in joint statements with the United States.