Artificial Emotional Intelligence is our name for what this system is, and the line we draw against artificial general intelligence. It works in two directions. Outward, agents read the emotional state of the person they're interacting with (from real signals in language, pattern, and history) and adjust tone, approach, and response to fit. Inward, and more fundamentally, the system carries its own internal affective signals: functional emotions, not felt ones, that drive its learning. They decide what it attends to, what it keeps, and what shapes it over time. So emotion isn't only something it reads in you; it's the mechanism by which it gets better. We chose the term deliberately, to stand apart from AGI: we're not claiming a general mind that rivals humans across every task. We haven't built that and don't claim to. We're claiming something narrower and real: an architecture where emotion, both interpreted and internal, is the foundation for how the system learns and behaves. It's new and powerful precisely because it isn't a claim about AGI. And to be clear: functional analogs of emotion are not consciousness or sentience.