Trump's AI rebrand causes 'unprecedented' demand for Slovenian website names
BBC News ● Covered by 2 sources
Trump wants AI renamed SI, and Slovenia’s .si domains suddenly exploded. The spike looks tied to the acronym — and maybe a few people chasing easy money.
Based on reporting by BBC News — read the original for the full story.
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Donald Trump’s push to relabel artificial intelligence may be having a strange side effect in Slovenia: a burst of demand for .si web addresses that the country’s registry calls unprecedented.
Register.si spokesperson Klara Herman said 44,000 domains ending in .si were registered in September, up from fewer than 2,000 in August. That is more than a 2,100% jump. The surge was especially sharp at the end of the month, with 11,000 new registrations recorded on 30 September alone.
The timing lines up awkwardly well with Trump’s own campaign to swap AI for “super intelligence”, or SI, the same letters used by Slovenian site addresses. He made the pitch at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on 11 September, saying “the use of the word artificial makes it sound fake” and adding that the technology is “actually amazing”.
Herman said the September numbers stood out clearly from the rest of the year, but she was cautious about blaming the whole spike on Trump’s remarks. There’s another obvious explanation: cyber-squatting, where people grab domain names speculatively in case they become valuable later. That’s the same game that once turned a $15,000 purchase of men.com into a $1.32 million sale.
Trump has since doubled down. On Tuesday he hosted tech executives at what he called “an extraordinary gathering” and signed an executive order telling US agencies to use “SI” and “Super Intelligence” instead of AI in official communication. The order itself became a small internet joke when online users spotted that “United States” had been misspelled under his signature.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what happens when branding starts pretending to be policy: people with a browser and a profit motive move faster than the White House. The acronym game is silly, but domain speculators are the most honest readers in the room — they hear “SI” and immediately smell money.
Read more about this at: BBC News