Will OpenAI change its name to “OpenSI”? Probably not, but it’s a question worth asking given the increasingly chummy relationship between the AI company and President Donald Trump.

On September 29, the president signed an executive order officially renaming AI “SI,” or “superintelligence,” and ordered that government agencies comply with the change in their official communications. The administration is already enforcing the change, with reports this week that the Justice Department instructed employees to use the new language in official documents.

The order doesn’t require private companies to adopt the new terminology, but Elon Musk, whose relationship with Trump has recently warmed, quickly announced plans to rename his company SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI.

Fast Company asked OpenAI, which also has “AI” in its name, whether it plans to rebrand as “OpenSI,” but the company didn’t immediately respond Friday. The Washington Examiner asked the same question, and got no response. However, Sam Altman said on a Politico podcast that his company has “no plans” for a name change. “But we do like we have been talking about super intelligence a lot, and we will continue to talk about it,” he added.

Trump told reporters that the “artificial intelligence” or “AI” name isn’t right for the technology “because it’s not artificial.” He’d earlier said at the UN General Assembly that the change is needed because “artificial” makes it “sound fake.” 

Really, it’s all about image rehabilitation. Amid a wave of negative backlash to new data centers and to the privacy risks of frontier AI models, the White House is hoping a name change can help improve the tech’s public image.

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