The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps have directed their commands to stop writing "artificial intelligence" in official communications, replacing the term with "super intelligence" — the most concrete step yet in the federal government's sweeping rebrand of the technology.
A Navy administrative memo issued Thursday orders that websites, correspondence, training materials, fleet advisories and other official documents refer to the technology as "super intelligence," with the abbreviation "SI" replacing "AI," Stars and Stripes reported. The Marine Corps announced a similar change on Friday. Nothing about the services' technology is changing — only the words used to describe it. For more context on this story, see our ongoing AI industry coverage.
"To the maximum extent permitted by law, commands and organizations will use 'Super Intelligence' and 'SI' in place of 'Artificial Intelligence' and 'AI' in official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents, and other non-statutory documents," the memo said, according to Stars and Stripes.
Why the Navy Says the Name Change Matters
The memo frames the switch as more than cosmetic. The capabilities of artificial intelligence "transcend historical definitions of automation," the service said in the document, arguing that the new terminology better reflects the Navy's approach to scaling the technology across its operations at what it described as supersonic speed.
The change covers a wide footprint of military communication: public-facing websites, internal correspondence, training curricula, fleet advisories, policy documents and reports. The one carve-out is statutory — documents whose language is fixed by law will continue to use the term Congress wrote, which is why the directive is qualified with the phrase "to the maximum extent permitted by law."
The Navy appears to be the first military service to formally implement the change, Stars and Stripes reported, though the order applies government-wide. President Donald Trump ordered all executive branch offices and departments, including the military services, to make the switch last month. The rebrand was formalized in an order titled "Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence," published in the Federal Register on October 2.
A Pattern of Official Renaming
The directive joins a series of terminology changes the administration has imposed on federal agencies. Interior waters are now officially the Gulf of America rather than the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Ontario appears in some government materials as Lake America, and the Defense Department has rebranded itself as the Department of War. Nextgov has reported similar "super intelligence" wording directives at the State Department.
For the Navy, the renaming lands amid a broader push to fold machine learning into fleet operations. The service already operates dedicated AI hardware for defense research, including an Nvidia DGX GB300 supercomputer installed at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
What Changes for Sailors, Marines and Contractors
In practice, the directive means that technical manuals, public affairs releases, briefing slides and procurement paperwork will gradually swap "AI" for "SI" as documents are updated. Sailors and Marines writing performance reports, staff studies or public communications will be expected to follow the new convention, and vendors doing business with the two services will likely see the terminology appear in requests for proposals and contract language over time.
Whether the rest of the Department of War's components follow with their own formal memos remains to be seen. The Army and Air Force have not announced equivalent directives, and it is unclear whether joint commands — which communicate with all services — will standardize on the new term, stick with Congress's statutory language, or use both depending on the audience.
A Word With Baggage
The rebrand puts the military at odds with decades of established usage. In AI research, "superintelligence" has long described a hypothetical system that exceeds human cognitive ability across virtually every domain — a speculative concept popularized in academic and popular writing about long-term AI risk, not a label for any deployed technology. Applied research organizations, standards bodies and allied governments continue to use "artificial intelligence," a term embedded in international agreements, export control regimes and the EU AI Act.
That gap could create friction at the boundaries: NATO interoperability documents, multinational exercises and joint research programs will still say "AI," meaning Navy personnel will need to be fluent in both vocabularies for the foreseeable future. Critics of the rebrand, including commentators at Time magazine who examined the administration's push, have questioned whether renaming the technology changes anything about how it is built, procured or governed.
For now, the practical effect is narrow but visible: the Pentagon's sea services have made "super intelligence" the official house style, and anyone reading a Navy website, fleet advisory or training syllabus from this week forward will see the new name in place of the old one.
The directive is effective immediately, according to the memo, with the Marine Corps instruction taking the same line. Commands that have already published materials using "artificial intelligence" are not required to purge archives, but new and updated documents are expected to comply.
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