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On Friday, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff posted two sentences on X that neatly captured one of the strangest corporate episodes of the year: "The era of Super Intelligence is here. AIForce is officially SIForce."
According to reports from Business Insider, The Next Web and several tech outlets, Salesforce has renamed its flagship AI agent platform — the system that plugs Salesforce data into tools such as Claude and Slack, launched at Dreamforce last month — from AIForce to SIForce. No new capabilities were announced. No benchmarks, no technical explanation. Just a new name, unveiled one day after the American president declared users of the old term "THE ENEMY!"
How we got here
The chain of events began on September 29, when President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14434, directing federal agencies to replace "Artificial Intelligence" and "AI" with "Super Intelligence" and "SI" in official communications, websites, reports and policy documents. The order even set a 60-day clock for the president's science adviser to propose a legal definition of the new term.
Nine days later, on October 9, Trump escalated on Truth Social, writing that the White House "considers anyone that uses the term, 'Artificial Intelligence,' as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, 'Super Intelligence,' THE ENEMY!" Benioff's rebrand arrived the next day. The timing is hard to miss — though Benioff's post itself never mentioned Trump or explained the motivation.
An order that binds only the government — and an industry that follows anyway
Crucially, the executive order does not apply to private companies. Yet Silicon Valley is aligning anyway. Elon Musk moved first: on October 5 he pledged to rename SpaceX's AI division, SpaceXAI, to SpaceXSI, and updated its social media accounts. Microsoft's Satya Nadella wrote "Super Intelligence" as two capitalised words for the first time in an X post on October 10. Jeff Bezos endorsed the term in a Fox News interview, remarking that "artificial" is "not a very flattering thing."
Inside the government, the switch has been patchy. AI.gov has become SI.gov; the Justice Department instructed staff on October 6 to use the new term in court filings "when appropriate"; the Interior Department retitled a document its "Use of Generative Super Intelligence Policy" — while the summary beneath still describes "generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies."
Not everyone is playing along. OpenAI's Sam Altman confirmed his company has "no plans" to become OpenSI, even as OpenAI's president signed the White House's new Accord on Super Intelligence. Scale AI did not respond to questions about a rebrand.
Why analysts are uneasy
Here is where the story turns from farce to substance. Computer scientists and AI researchers warn that pasting the label "superintelligence" onto today's systems distorts technical reality. In the field, "superintelligence" traditionally denotes systems far more capable than humans across virtually all tasks — a threshold today's chatbots and agents do not remotely meet, whatever their brand names claim.
The more cynical reading, offered by industry watchers, is about procurement: if the federal government signals that it buys only "Super Intelligence," vendors will cross out "AI" on the invoice to keep the contracts flowing. It is a reminder that language is never neutral — it carries budgets, regulatory scrutiny, and political loyalty with it.
Whatever the motive, the episode is a case study in how fast a government language mandate can reshape corporate branding in the social-media age: ten days from executive order to one of the world's largest software companies rewriting its product name. The technology underneath did not change a single line of code. Only the words did — and the words were the point.
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