Slovenia’s .si domains surge after Trump ‘SI’ order

Slovenia's .si internet domain is having a rush of registrations after President Donald Trump told U.S. federal agencies to stop saying "artificial intelligence" and use "super intelligence," or SI, instead. Klara Herman, a spokesperson for Slovenia's domain registry, told the BBC that about 44,000 addresses ending in .si were registered in September. About 11,000 of them came on September 30 alone, the day after Trump signed the executive order. She called the demand unprecedented compared with the previous 12 months, but she was careful not to blame the increase on Trump alone.cphpost+2

August had fewer than 2,000 new registrations, the trade outlet Neowin reported. That puts September's increase at more than 2,100%. The registry also recorded almost 13,000 new .si names in a single 24-hour period this week.techcrunch+1

From UN speech to executive order

Trump first used the term "super intelligence" in a Truth Social post on September 19. He pushed the idea in his September 22 speech to the United Nations General Assembly. "The use of the word 'artificial' makes it sound fake," he said. "It is not fake, it is actually fantastic". The order he signed on September 29 says today's frontier systems "increasingly represent not merely artificial intelligence but a new super intelligence". It applies to federal agencies only, not private companies.beincrypto+3

Speculators and resellers

The web hosting company Hostinger told TechCrunch that .si is now its second most popular domain ending, after .com. Its customers registered about 4,300 .si names on September 30 and about 5,400 on October 1. More than half of the buyers were in the U.S. or India. Only about 3% of those names are clearly related to AI, and Hostinger said some buyers may plan to resell them. Netcraft, an internet security company, reported that more than half of the .si domains it tracked at the registrar Dynadot were later listed for resale. Price may be part of the appeal. A .si name costs about $11 a year, while a .ai name requires a two-year registration costing roughly $180.netcraft+2

The rush is unlikely to bring Slovenia anything like the money Anguilla has made from .ai. "For Anguilla, .ai became a second economy. For Slovenia, .si is a nice bonus," said Klaudijus Januitis, who heads domains at Hostinger. He noted that .si fees go to the registry, not the government treasury.techcrunch

Insider claims remain unproven

Adam Cochran, an investor and policy consultant, said in a widely shared thread on X that .si registrations started climbing in June. He suggested that people with early knowledge of the name change bought domains before it was announced. No public record identifies those buyers or connects them to Trump or his associates. A White House official told the fact-checking site Snopes that the claim was not true. Snopes has rated the claim unproven.san+2