The U.S. Census Bureau and “Super Intelligence”

I was reminded today of AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies, a chart produced by Apollo Global Management in September 2025, which appeared to show a slowdown in U.S. corporate AI adoption based on numbers collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. At the time I used that chart to demonstrate GPT-5 data analysis, and then to experiment with Claude's new Code Interpreter.

I decided to try running those numbers again to see what had changed over the past year, and in doing so learned that the Bureau has fallen foul of Executive Order 14434, aka the asinine Super Intelligence one. First, the updated chart Every two weeks the U.S. Census Bureau runs a survey called the Business Trends and Outlook Survey (aka BTOS).

Each time it goes to 200,000 businesses out of 1.2 million total - the surveyed group (a "panel") cycles such that an individual business only completes the survey every twelve weeks. The latest data is published on alternating Thursdays at 10am.