Newsom signs order keeping 'artificial intelligence' term in California

By Splitfeed EditorialLast updated Oct 1, 2026, 20:30 UTC

On October 1, 2026, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order directing the state to continue using the term "artificial intelligence" in all official contexts. The order is a direct response to a federal push by President Donald Trump, who issued his own executive order replacing "artificial intelligence" with "super intelligence" at the federal level. Trump's stated rationale, as reported by UM LEGACY PRESS LTD, was that the change reflected the "promise, potential, and rapidly advancing capabilities" of the technology. Newsom's counter-order puts California's official language in explicit conflict with Washington's preferred framing.

The dispute is about more than vocabulary. Terminology shapes regulation, funding priorities, public perception, and how legislators write law. A state as large as California, home to much of the American technology industry, standardizing on a different term than the federal government creates practical complications for companies, agencies, and researchers operating across jurisdictions. It also extends a longer pattern of conflict between Newsom and the Trump administration over technology governance, making the labeling fight a proxy for deeper disagreements about who sets the agenda for AI policy in the United States. Whether either term accurately describes the technology is itself genuinely contested.

The Pro-AI camp has sided with Trump's framing, arguing that "super intelligence" better captures what the technology is becoming and signals appropriate ambition. On the other side, polling cited by Opinion Today shows the rebranding is broadly unpopular, with only 25 percent approving and 58 percent disapproving, suggesting the Anti-AI camp sees the federal move as hype-driven and the California order as a reasonable corrective. The Middle Ground camp has taken the most sardonic position, with multiple accounts including Statesora News and Amerivo arguing that Trump is correct that "artificial intelligence" is a poor name, but that "super intelligence" is no improvement, with one widely circulated piece suggesting "robotic gadgets" as a tongue-in-cheek alternative. This camp treats the whole episode as a reminder that the underlying technology still lacks a name that reflects what it actually does.

The argument is unlikely to be settled by either executive order alone. What would clarify the stakes is whether Congress moves to codify either term in federal statute, or whether California's terminology begins to appear in state legislation and contracts in ways that create measurable friction with federal programs. Any such development would shift this from a symbolic confrontation into one with enforceable consequences.