A terminology change by the Trump administration has resulted in a windfall for a surprising group of people: anyone who owns a Slovenian web address.
After President Donald Trump’s announcement at the United Nations that the government will now use “super intelligence” instead of “AI,” The Slovenia Times reported that “3,930 new .si domains were registered in just 24 hours, surpassing the 3,515 domains registered” in August. That number increased to over 6,000 registrations over the next day.
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And at least one commenter realized that “.si” would soon be a tradable commodity.
The terminology change was made official Wednesday, with a flashy White House Instagram post “INAUGURATING THE ERA OF SUPER INTELLIGENCE,” and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s comment at a press conference that data centers should be renamed “super intelligence factories.”
READ MORE: Trump says ‘AI’ is now ‘Super Intelligence.’ What’s the difference anyway?
As Straight Arrow previously reported, the small island country of Anguilla saw an unprecedented financial windfall of almost $100 million over the last three years as its “.ai” domain names became the hottest addresses on the internet.
Now it’s Slovenia’s turn. However, The Slovenia Times said that a rush to buy would not benefit first lady Melania Trump’s home country in the same way, as the national registrar charges domain vendors only a $10 fee per address.
But there’s still profit to be made.
Adam Cochran, who describes himself as a “professor, policy consultant, independent journalist and father” on X, went viral this week, suggesting that government insiders bought up the domain name earlier in the summer, before the change was announced. In a 15-post thread, he laid out his evidence for his theory that some people may have had early access to the information.
Cochran provided screenshots from several domain-registration websites. He reported that more than 7,000 domains with the “.si” extension were registered in July of this year, but that the previous two years saw a much lower average of only around 55 per day.
And he said the early buyers are now reselling those same addresses for thousands — or even millions — of dollars.
Straight Arrow found posts on X dating back to early June, in which domain squatters had started speculatively buying up the addresses. “The .si frenzy is continuing,” said one user who posted he’d originally bought “build.si” for $9 and had just sold it for $15,000. On Sept. 29, the same user posted that he’d made “$30,000 in .si sales today.”
Cybersquatting — buying an address to sell later, hoping that future buyers will be desperate enough to pay a lot of money for it — is a common practice.
As the U.S. federal government prepares to stop recognizing the term “artificial intelligence,” government websites and companies that want to use the “.si” domain will have to buy those addresses from their current owners.
“How do we know this is Trump’s inner circle?” Cochran asked on X. “The registrations started to tick up LONG before this announcement. While domain squatters may purchase bulk domain names of common words, they don’t buy over-priced after market domains which started to sell around the same time.”
Cochran’s claims are “completely false,” according to the White House. In an email to Straight Arrow, a White House spokesperson emphasized Trump’s remarks that “Artificial means it’s fake or it’s false, and this is not. This is real. So — and I think it’s going to be great.”
“Two letters acquired a presidential endorsement for a meaning speculators were already betting on. Those who bought early are now looking to cash in,” one Dutch CEO wrote on LinkedIn.
READ MORE: Are we all going to die? Inside the push to control AI regulation
The boom in new “.si” addresses may also reflect the term becoming more common, as it has been associated with the field of AI for a while.
As Straight Arrow previously reported, the term “super intelligence” is sometimes used to refer to a type of AI that is smarter than all humans. It has also been used to refer to “god-like” AI, or an AI that might take over the world. It’s a term sometimes associated with the Effective Altruist movement, which believes that a superintelligence might kill all humans if it becomes too powerful.
It was already growing in popularity before the announcement. Earlier this summer, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a long essay called “The Future Is For Everyone” in which he claimed that, one day, “people will be able to use superintelligence beyond human capacity.”
Round out your reading
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- Kelvin wave incoming: Why the US should care.
