On September 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order dropping “artificial intelligence” from its official vocabulary and directing all federal departments and agencies to adopt “Super Intelligence” or “SI.” instead, a shift that some of the biggest names in technology have begun to echo.
XDC Network is among the first to change a product name in response. Its agent payments marketplace, formerly XDC AI, now operates as XDC SI. Existing integrations, wallets and API listings carry over unchanged.
The order was signed after a White House summit where executives from Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Nvidia signed a voluntary accord on Super Intelligence, which commits them to internal controls and review of advanced systems. Trump has said the word “artificial” undersells what the technology can do, and that “Super Intelligence” better reflects its promise and rapidly advancing capabilities.
Atul Khekade, co-founder of XDC Network, said the rename reflects how quickly the technology has moved beyond its original label. “AI agents have gone from answering questions to running errands, and every errand ends in a payment,” he said. “XDC SI is built to be the payment layer for the era of Super Intelligence.”
The shift has reached the largest names in technology. Elon Musk endorsed the term on X, writing that SI is better than AI, and confirmed in a reply that SpaceX “will make that change” to rename its AI division SpaceXSI. He later added that “SpaceX is a super intelligence company.”
XDC SI is a marketplace where AI agents can discover and pay for APIs, the connections that give software access to data, tools and online services. Agents pay per call in USDC, a dollar-backed stablecoin, so they are charged only for what they use. An agent planning a business trip, for example, can pay for the flight data it needs and complete the booking within the same task. Any business can offer its API on the marketplace through XDC SI’s Gateway without making changes to its code, and payments go directly to the provider’s own wallet as soon as the API is used. All payments settle on XDC Network, and network fees are covered, so agents do not need to hold crypto tokens to transact.
XDC SI enters a wider race to give AI agents the ability to complete purchases on their own, rather than stopping at a recommendation. Mastercard has introduced Agent Pay for AI-initiated transactions, Visa has launched its Trusted Agent Protocol, and McKinsey estimates AI agents could mediate $3 trillion to $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030.
Getting started is designed to be as easy as adding a card to Apple Pay. XDC SI plugs directly into popular AI assistants, so an agent people already use can start paying for services with only a few steps of setup. Agents can also borrow and lend digital dollars on the platform, using XDC tokens as security, through established lending services such as Fathom, PrimeFi, Morpho and Silo. This means an agent that runs short of funds partway through a task can access what it needs to finish the job, much like a business drawing on a credit line.
Washington has given the technology a new name. The bigger change is who will be doing the spending. Agents are becoming customers in their own right, working around the clock and paying in amounts too small and too frequent for the systems built for people. Whoever builds the rails for them will shape the next era of finance.
“We believe the next billion transactions on XDC Network will be made by agents, not people,” Khekade said. “Super Intelligence will need money that moves as fast as it thinks. We are building it now.”
The “money that moves as fast as it thinks” idea now appears only once, in Atul’s voice where it lands hardest. “XDC intends to be that system” is gone, so the payment-layer claim stays in the earlier quote. The narration now describes a new idea, payments too small and frequent for existing systems, instead of repeating what agents do.
