AI Is Now "SI": What the Super Intelligence Rename Means for Small Businesses

8 min readPipeSheets Team

Short answer: nothing about your legal obligations, contracts or software changed. On September 29, 2026 the President signed Executive Order 14434, "Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence", which tells executive-branch agencies to use the terms "Super Intelligence" and "SI" in place of "Artificial Intelligence" and "AI". It was published in the Federal Register on October 2, 2026 at 91 FR 63129. For a small business, the rename is a vocabulary change in government documents, not a new rule.

This post walks through the order section by section, because most news coverage summarises the headline and skips the text. The text is short, and the details are where the practical answers live. Note that this is an explainer, not legal advice.

What the Super Intelligence executive order actually says

The order has four sections. Here is what each one does, quoted or closely paraphrased from the White House text.

EO 14434 at a glance (read on the White House page, 2026-10-10)
Section	What it does	Who it binds
Sec. 1, Purpose	States the policy: "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'".	Executive-branch agencies
Sec. 2(a), Implementation	Agencies use SI "in official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents, and other non-statutory documents within the executive branch".	Executive-branch agencies
Sec. 2(b)	"Nothing in this section requires the alteration of previously issued regulations, Presidential actions, contracts, grants, or other historical documents."	Nobody has to rewrite existing documents
Sec. 3(a), Definition	For the order, SI means "the technologies and systems encompassed by the term 'artificial intelligence' as defined in section 9401(3) of title 15, United States Code".	Same technology, new label
Sec. 3(b)	Within 60 days, the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (APST) submits proposed legislative language for a federal definition of SI.	A proposal to the President, not a rule
Sec. 4(c)	The order creates no right or benefit "enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States" or any other person.	No private cause of action

What changed, and what did not

It helps to separate the two lists, because they get blurred in coverage.

What changed:

Federal agencies are directed to write "Super Intelligence" and "SI" in new correspondence, websites, reports and policy documents (Sec. 2(a)).
Agencies are updating their public pages. NIST's page at nist.gov/super-intelligence says NIST "is working to update its communications to incorporate the term 'super intelligence' as directed".
A 60-day clock is running for a proposed statutory definition. Sixty days from September 29, 2026 lands around November 28, 2026 (our arithmetic; the order gives the number of days, not a date).

What did not change:

The legal definition. Sec. 3(a) points SI at the existing statutory definition of artificial intelligence in 15 U.S.C. 9401(3): "a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations or decisions influencing real or virtual environments".
Existing contracts, grants and regulations. Sec. 2(b) says the order does not require altering them.
Statutes. An executive order cannot rewrite an Act of Congress. Sec. 3(b) only asks for *proposed* legislative language.
Your software, your vendors' terms, or any state law. None of these are addressed by the order.

One correction to a line you may see elsewhere: the "60-day follow-up" in the order is a legislative proposal from the President's science adviser, not agency guidance. As of October 10, 2026 we could find no OMB, GSA or FAR Council guidance implementing the rename. If that changes, this post will be updated.

How we got here: a short timeline

The sequence, with sources:

Week of September 22, 2026: the President previewed the rename in his UN General Assembly address. The Associated Press reported on September 23 that the State Department's Bureau of International Organization Affairs told staff to use "super intelligence" and "SI" going forward. That instruction came from an internal email the AP obtained; we have not seen it.
September 29, 2026: Executive Order 14434 signed.
October 2, 2026: published in the Federal Register (91 FR 63129). The same day, law firms Wiley and K&L Gates issued client alerts. Wiley's reads: "The EO changes federal terminology, not the substantive scope" of covered technologies.
Around November 28, 2026: the APST's proposed legislative language is due to the President.

Does the SI rename affect my small business?

For most businesses, no. If you do not sell to or correspond with federal agencies, you will mostly notice the new term on government websites. Your accounting software, your bank, and the tools you use to clean spreadsheets are not covered by the order and are under no obligation to rename anything.

If you *do* work with federal agencies, three practical situations come up.

1. You are responding to a new solicitation or writing a new report

Mirror the agency's terminology. If the solicitation says "SI", say "SI". Define the term once, near the top, so nobody has to guess. A wording that tracks the order is: "Super Intelligence (SI), meaning artificial intelligence as defined in 15 U.S.C. 9401(3)". Wiley's alert suggests contractors "seek clarification as needed to confirm that requirements remain the same", which is sensible when a document uses the new term without defining it.

2. You have an existing contract or grant that says "AI"

Leave it alone unless the agency asks. Sec. 2(b) is explicit that previously issued contracts and grants need not be altered, and K&L Gates reads it the same way: the order "does not require agencies to revisit or reissue prior regulations, presidential actions, contracts, grants" or other historical documents.

3. You maintain internal documents that mention "AI"

Resist the urge to run a global find-and-replace. In government contracting, "SI" already means *systems integrator*, and "AI" appears inside words ("MAINTAIN", "AIRCRAFT"), product names, and citations to statutes that still say "artificial intelligence". If you update a tracker or glossary, use whole-word, case-sensitive matching and keep a short exclusion list.

A worked example: updating a vendor tracker without breaking it

Suppose you keep a CSV of capability statements with a Category column. A naive replace of "AI" with "SI" produces damage like this:

Vendor,Category,Notes
Acme Corp,AI analytics,Prime SI on contract 47QT
Beta LLC,MAINTAIN services,AI-assisted scheduling

# after a naive replace of "AI" -> "SI":
Vendor,Category,Notes
Acme Corp,SI analytics,Prime SI on contract 47QT   <- two different meanings of SI
Beta LLC,MSINTSIN services,SI-assisted scheduling   <- MAINTAIN is now garbage

The safe version is a whole-word rule with a boundary check, applied only to the column you intend to change. In PipeSheets this is a find-and-replace step with the regex option, which previews every affected cell before anything is written. In Excel, a formula such as the one below does the same for one column (it checks that "AI" is a standalone token before replacing it):

=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(" AI "," "&B2&" ")),SUBSTITUTE(" "&B2&" "," AI "," SI "),B2)

Then trim the result, and keep the original column so the change can be reviewed and reverted. The principle is the same as everywhere else in data cleanup: a tool should suggest a change and show you the affected rows; it should never silently rewrite your file.

Is "Super Intelligence" the same as superintelligence?

No, and this is the confusion most worth clearing up. In AI research, "superintelligence" refers to a hypothetical system that surpasses human intelligence across the board. The order does not claim that any such system exists. Sec. 3(a) defines SI as the same technologies already covered by the statutory AI definition. A spreadsheet tool that uses a language model to suggest a date format is "SI" under the order's definition in the same way it was "AI" the week before. It is not superintelligent, and neither is PipeSheets.

What to watch next

Three things could change the picture:

The APST legislative proposal due around November 28, 2026. If Congress later adopts a statutory definition, that is when definitions used in standards, state laws and compliance programs could start to diverge, which is the longer-term risk the law-firm alerts flag.
Any OMB, GSA or FAR Council guidance on procurement language. None existed when we checked on October 10, 2026.
How agencies handle the "SI = systems integrator" collision in their own documents.

For plain-English definitions of every sense of "SI" you will now run into, including the research meaning of superintelligence and the SI units, we keep a separate glossary. Meanwhile, if your actual problem is a messy export rather than a vocabulary change, PipeSheets cleans CSV and Excel files with deterministic, previewable steps, and nothing in that process involves an AI model, super or otherwise.