WASHINGTON — The federal government declared victory over artificial intelligence Monday, signing an executive order that instructs all 438 federal agencies to replace the term "artificial intelligence" with "American Superior Intelligence" in official documents, press releases, memos, training materials, procurement contracts, and, where applicable, refrigerator magnets. The machines themselves were not notified of the change and continue to operate as before.
The order, described by senior officials as "the most consequential technological intervention since we put an eagle on the NOAA website," took effect immediately upon signing, triggering what the Bureau of Nomenclature Modernization estimated to be approximately 2.3 million find-and-replace operations across the federal document ecosystem. The Bureau of Nomenclature Modernization was established the same morning to oversee this work and will be dissolved once it confirms that nobody is still typing the old letters.
"What we've done here is very big," said an unnamed official who was not authorized to describe how big it was. "Other countries have artificial intelligence. We now have something called American Superior Intelligence, which, if you think about it, is just better." The official declined to elaborate on the mechanism by which superiority was achieved, citing the ongoing nature of the achievement.
Experts in the field confirmed that the renaming has had no detectable effect on the underlying capabilities of any system. Language models remain equally capable of generating plausible nonsense. Autonomous vehicles continue to be confused by cones. Facial recognition software performs with the same well-documented inconsistency it demonstrated under its previous name. "The technology is exactly where it was last week," said a researcher who asked to be identified only as someone who has read a computer. "Except now our grant applications are in violation of federal style guidelines."
The executive order is, per a verified Associated Press report, a real thing that happened. President Trump signed a directive instructing federal agencies to adopt the term "Super Intelligence" — later expanded in implementation guidance to "American Superior Intelligence" — as part of a broader effort to assert national dominance in the technology sector through vocabulary. This is the verified fact in this article, included here because the Bureau of Editorial Restraint determined it required no embellishment.
Congressional response was swift and varied. Members of the House Science Committee requested a briefing on whether American Superior Intelligence would be subject to the same oversight frameworks as artificial intelligence, or whether the new name created a regulatory gap that would need to be filled by a subcommittee not yet formed. The Senate, for its part, passed a resolution affirming that words mean things, with three senators voting present.
Federal contractors have begun submitting revised invoices reflecting the updated terminology, a process the Office of Budget and Procurement estimates will cost between $4 million and $4 million. Several agencies reported minor confusion when automated systems flagged the word "artificial" in other contexts, briefly reclassifying artificial turf, artificial sweeteners, and a painting described as having "an artificial quality" in a 1987 GSA inventory as regulated technology assets subject to the new order.
Implementation is expected to be complete by the end of the fiscal year, at which point the government will evaluate whether the nation's competitive position in the technology sector has improved, declined, or remained statistically indistinguishable from what it was before a man with a pen changed a noun. The robots will be consulted, under their new name, and their responses will be taken under advisement.