From AI to “Super Intelligence”: Why the US Fed Just Rebranded Its AI Program

The US Federal Reserve Board quietly made a symbolic but telling move this week: it scrubbed references to “artificial intelligence (AI)” from its staff guidance page and replaced them with “super intelligence (SI).” The change, dated October 30, 2026, aligns the Fed with President Biden’s September 29 executive order 14434, which formally frames advanced AI as “super intelligence” in federal policy.

Behind the wording shift is a broader governance push. The Fed has built an internal “Super Intelligence Program” that aims to promote responsible use of powerful models, encourage innovation inside the central bank, and enforce strict risk controls and legal compliance. It has even created a new senior role, the Chief Super Intelligence Officer, mirroring a CIO but dedicated to advanced AI systems.

The Board is also publishing a catalog of SI use cases and inviting public feedback, an unusual level of transparency for a financial regulator. While the technical tools in use may not have changed overnight, reclassifying them as “super intelligence” signals that US regulators now see frontier‑level AI less as generic software and more as a systemic technology that warrants its own titles, programs, and oversight structures. Other federal agencies—and foreign central banks—are likely to watch this shift closely.