Donald Trump’s call to rename AI to SI has found a big taker.
Elon Musk has said he will rename SpaceXAI, the AI division of SpaceX, to “SpaceXSI”, following US President Donald Trump’s push to retire the term “AI” in favour of “SI”, short for Super Intelligence.
Musk first posted on X that there should be “No more AI”, adding “SI” and “It’s better”. When an X user asked whether the company could be renamed to SpaceXSI, Musk replied: “Yes, we will make that change.”
The exchange came just days after Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in official communications, websites, reports and other non-statutory documents. The order was signed on September 29 after a White House meeting with leading tech executives, and followed Trump’s remarks at the UN General Assembly the week before, where he called for the new name. Trump has argued that the word “artificial” makes the technology sound fake.
Musk has already been using the new term
Musk appeared to adopt the terminology quickly. During the White House event, he reportedly started to say “AI” before correcting himself and switching to “SI”. He also reshared a clip of the gathering with the caption “Super Intelligence”. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has similarly embraced the new vocabulary, describing AI data centres as “super intelligence factories”.
The order applies only to the federal government and doesn’t require private companies to rename their products or stop using the term AI. The White House has also asked its science and technology adviser to propose a federal legal definition of “Super Intelligence” within 60 days.
SpaceXAI’s short naming history
If Musk follows through, it would be the second rebrand for the AI business in a matter of months. SpaceX acquired xAI in February, and in July the AI company officially changed its name and X handle to SpaceXAI, with a new logo that merged the xAI and SpaceX identities. The division is the umbrella for Grok, the X platform and SpaceX’s other AI products, and it sits inside a company that went public in June in what became the largest IPO ever, briefly making Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
The unit has also grown through acquisitions. SpaceX closed its $60 billion all-stock acquisition of AI coding tool Cursor in August, and Cursor is being integrated into the SpaceXAI team. A rename to SpaceXSI would mean changing the branding on a business that now spans a chatbot, a social network, a coding tool and some of the largest AI compute clusters in the world.
The public isn’t sold on “SI” yet
While tech leaders have been quick to adopt the new term, the public has been slower. A YouGov poll cited by Axios found that 53% of respondents considered “artificial intelligence” the better term, compared with just 9% who preferred “super intelligence”.
It’s also unclear how quickly Musk’s rename will actually happen. He hasn’t said when the change would take effect, and SpaceXAI hasn’t announced any new branding, name or handle so far.