Elon Musk at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, in February 2025. Image: Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0, cropped
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Elon Musk says SpaceXAI, the company behind Grok, will change its name to SpaceXSI, making it the first big AI company to take up Donald Trump’s call to swap “AI” for “SI”, short for Super Intelligence. Musk said so on X on Sunday morning.
“Yes, we will make that change”
Musk first posted “No more AI”, followed by “SI” and “It’s better”. When another X user asked whether that meant the company would be renamed SpaceXSI, he replied: “Yes, we will make that change.”
Yes, we will make that change
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 4, 2026
That was all he said. Musk didn’t give a date, and he didn’t say whether Grok, the X platform or Cursor, which SpaceX bought in August, would change their branding too. As far as we can see, SpaceXAI hasn’t announced a new name, logo or handle of its own.
It would be the company’s second change of name this year. SpaceX took over xAI in February, and in July the AI business became SpaceXAI, with a logo that merged the two brands, as OfficeChai notes.
Where the new name comes from
Trump signed an executive order on September 29, “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence”, telling every federal agency to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in place of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI”. It came a week after he told the UN that artificial intelligence would now be called superintelligence.
The order only covers the federal government. It doesn’t ask companies to rename anything, and it keeps the old legal meaning: “Super Intelligence” is defined as exactly what US law already calls artificial intelligence. The President’s science adviser has 60 days to propose a new federal definition, which would need Congress to become law.
Not everyone has gone along with it. California’s governor told state agencies to keep saying “AI”, and the new name has set off a rush for Slovenian .si web addresses. A YouGov poll reported by Axios found 53% of Americans thought “artificial intelligence” was the better term, against 9% for “super intelligence”.
Close to the White House, and under pressure elsewhere
Musk has been one of the loudest backers of the White House’s approach. SpaceXAI was one of the six companies that signed Trump’s voluntary “morally binding” accord on the same day as the order, in place of new rules.
The rename talk also comes a day before New York City Council’s hearing on AI safety, where SpaceXAI is the one company the Council had to subpoena to testify after it ignored a request to appear. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta agreed to take part.
Why it matters
A new name changes nothing about how Grok is built or regulated, and the order itself admits that “Super Intelligence” means the same as AI in law. But if one of the six biggest AI companies adopts it, Trump’s term moves from government paperwork into the industry’s own branding, and others may feel pressure to follow.
Sources: Elon Musk on X, White House executive order, “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence”, OfficeChai, Axios (YouGov poll).
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