Is today’s AI really “Super Intelligence”?

On September 29, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. executive branch to stop calling it Artificial Intelligence (AI) and start calling it Super Intelligence (SI).

His argument was that this technology has become too powerful and transformative to still be described as "artificial."

But that raises an interesting question: Are we really at superintelligence already?

To answer that, you need to understand how AI has been evolving.

For a long time, much of the AI we encountered was what we call narrow AI.

These are systems built to do specific things very well.

Think of Netflix recommending what to watch, Google Maps finding the fastest route, or your bank detecting a suspicious transaction.

Then multimodal AI became more common.

Instead of working only with text or one type of information, the same system could now understand images, audio, video and documents. That is why today you can upload a PDF, show AI a picture, speak to it and ask questions about all of them in the same conversation.

Then came what we now call agentic AI.

This is where AI begins to move from simply answering questions to actually doing work.

You can give it a goal like:

"Research these companies, compare them, prepare a report and send me the findings."

It can break the instruction into steps, use tools and carry out parts of the work with less supervision from you.

That is roughly where much of the frontier of AI development is today.

And the next jump is much bigger. That is AGI — Artificial General Intelligence.

AGI would be an AI that can learn and work across almost any intellectual task with the flexibility of a capable human being. It could move from coding to law to accounting to strategy, and then learn something completely new without being built specifically for that task.

There is still debate about exactly what qualifies as AGI. And we have not established that we are there yet.

Beyond AGI is ASI — Artificial Superintelligence.

Now imagine an AI that is not just as capable as humans, but better than the best humans across virtually every intellectual field, science, medicine, engineering, mathematics, strategy, and creativity.

That is what the term "superintelligence" has traditionally meant. And we are not there yet.

Then there is the singularity. The singularity is not another type of AI.

It is the hypothetical point where AI becomes capable of improving AI so quickly that technological progress accelerates beyond our ability to predict what comes next.

So, when the U.S. government now calls today's AI "Super Intelligence," that is where the confusion comes in.

Interestingly, the executive order itself defines the government's new term, "Super Intelligence," using the existing legal definition of artificial intelligence.

In other words, the government has changed the name, but that does not mean the technology has suddenly achieved superintelligence in the scientific sense.

Politically, it is a new name for the technology we already have.

Technically, superintelligence has traditionally referred to something much further ahead.

So where are we today?

We have very powerful AI.

Much of today's frontier AI is multimodal.

It is becoming more agentic.

Its reasoning is improving rapidly.

But AGI has not been established.

ASI has not been established.

And that means, as powerful as AI already feels today, we may still be much closer to the beginning of this journey than the end.