Demand for Slovenian .si domains rose from fewer than 2,000 registrations in August to 44,000 in September — a 2,100 percent increase, according to official registrar register.si. According to BBC, the cause was an executive order by U.S. President Donald Trump, which renamed artificial intelligence in official documents: government agencies are now required to use the abbreviation SI (Super Intelligence) instead of the familiar AI. Following the terminology change, speculative buying of names in Slovenia's national zone began, and the marketing gesture instantly turned into a domain frenzy.

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What happened

The timeline looks like this. According to Netcraft, the frenzy began three days before Trump's speech at the UN General Assembly, after his post on Truth Social. Then, as BBC reports, on September 29 the president signed an executive order requiring U.S. government agencies to use the abbreviation SI instead of AI in official correspondence, websites, and reports. Registrar register.si recorded a peak on September 30: 11,000 names were registered in the .si zone in a single day. Speculators are buying through registrar Dynadot, and, according to Netcraft's estimate, about 52 percent of the domains have already been listed for resale rather than for projects. Domain Name Wire notes that the pace of registrations continued to grow after Trump's speech.

Context

The .si domain is Slovenia's first-level national zone, open for registration to anyone, and until recently its main appeal was price: about $11 per year versus roughly $180 for the .ai zone, whose premium is driven by its coincidence with the abbreviation for artificial intelligence. The renaming itself contains no technical component: behind the term Super Intelligence there is no new model architecture, methodology, or benchmarks — the executive order changes letters in documents, not system capabilities. For researchers, 'superintelligence' is a construct with promises built in from the start, without defining how it relates to the actual state of modeling, so the technical community continues to use the familiar abbreviation AI for now.

Why this matters for the industry

For the industry, this is an operational risk, not a technological event: according to Netcraft, 22 percent of .si registrations already match by name existing .ai domains, meaning roughly every fifth name in the zone replicates the name of an active .ai address. While most of the bought names have not been resold, owners of .ai brands have a short window open for defensive registration: a matching .si costs about $11 per year. The story has no impact on the computational side at all: neither model performance, latency, nor inference cost has changed. Product teams would be wise to work from a checklist: verify whether the .si twin of a production domain is available, secure it if necessary, include lookalike domains in anti-phishing monitoring and link filters, and configure brand-monitoring alerts for new ccTLD registrations.

Why this matters for users

For readers, the main threat is phishing: the .si domain differs from .ai by a single keystroke, the 's' key is next to 'a' on the keyboard, so the eye easily misses a fake in a link. Be more careful checking addresses when clicking links to demos, datasets, and mirrors of AI services, and if your project or favorite service lives on .ai — check whether its 'one-key twin' in .si is taken. Paying for a 'prestigious' .si for profit now only makes sense for speculators: about half of the names are going to resale rather than real projects, so an ordinary user or small site has no reason to join the frenzy.

What is still unknown / limitations

It is unknown whether the executive order will stand the test of time and whether SI will become established in actual document flow: if the term reaches the corpora of official U.S. texts, a mix of AI and SI may appear in them, complicating search and automated data-collection pipelines. September figures differ: register.si reported 44,000 registrations, while Domain Name Wire counted 46,000 — the final monthly summary still needs to be reconciled. There is no evidence in the sources of real use of the bought names for projects, and no breakdown into defensive brand purchases and speculative transactions is provided, so the resale share should be treated as an estimate from independent monitoring by Netcraft, not as an exact accounting.

Sources

Author

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