Bath cyber security company Netcraft says registrations of Slovenian .si domains briefly overtook the better-known .ai extension after Donald Trump suggested renaming artificial intelligence as “super intelligence”.
Netcraft tracked the surge in the roughly 25 hours after the US president’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 22 September. Trump argued that the word “artificial” makes the technology sound fake, and floated “super intelligence”, or SI, as a better label. The Bath firm published the findings on 24 September.
Anyone can register a .si name. It is not limited to people or companies in Slovenia. That open market, and a much lower price (about $11 a year for .si, against roughly $180 for a minimum two-year .ai registration), helps explain why buyers moved quickly once the idea hit the headlines.
Interest had started rising a few days earlier. On 19 September Trump posted a Truth Social poll asking whether AI should be renamed. Registrations climbed from around then. Many of the new names were filed through registrar Dynadot. Netcraft said about 52% of Dynadot’s .si registrations between that poll and the UN speech later appeared on Dynadot’s aftermarket, including names such as donaldjtrump.si and superintell.si.
Prediction markets picked up the same story. A Polymarket bet on whether Trump would rename AI by 30 September opened on 20 September and had drawn about $151,000 by the afternoon of 23 September.
Netcraft also looked at how often .si and .ai already share the same second-level name. It found more than 44,000 matching pairs, about 22% of all .si domains. Around 1,500 of those pairs pointed to the same IP address, which is common for holding pages and for-sale portfolios. Slovenia’s registry does not publish zone files, so Netcraft’s own internet survey is one of the few public ways to watch the trend.
For now, Netcraft says fraud on .si remains low. The concern is what happens if SI branding sticks. On a QWERTY keyboard, .si is one key away from .ai, which opens the door to mistypes and to deliberate lookalike sites. Brands that already own .ai names could also face cybersquatters registering the .si version to sell on later.
There is an odd personal footnote: Melania Trump and Barron Trump hold Slovenian citizenship. Netcraft notes it as colour, not as an explanation for the registration spike.
Netcraft is based in Bath and regularly publishes this kind of large-scale internet research. Its latest look at .si versus .ai is a reminder of how quickly political language can move the domain market, and how a cheap country-code extension can suddenly look valuable when a new acronym catches on.