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President Donald Trump's campaign to rebrand artificial intelligence as "super intelligence" appears to have triggered an unexpected and dramatic spike in website domain registrations in Slovenia, according to the country's official national registry. The surge has been described as "unprecedented" by registry officials, who say the numbers for September far exceed anything recorded in the previous year.
The connection lies in the initials. Trump wants AI to be known as SI — short for super intelligence — which happens to be the same two-letter suffix that identifies Slovenian websites. That coincidence appears to have set off a wave of speculative purchasing activity among individuals hoping to profit from the sudden global attention on the term.
Register.si spokesperson Klara Herman said 44,000 web addresses ending in .si were registered during September, compared with fewer than 2,000 in August. That represents an increase of more than 2,100 percent in a single month, a scale of activity she described as without parallel over the preceding twelve months.
Herman noted that the volume of registrations in late September stood out "very clearly" against every other month of the year. On 30 September alone, she said, 11,000 new registrations were recorded — a figure that would normally represent a substantial portion of an entire year's activity for a small national registry.
Despite the striking correlation, Herman struck a cautious tone about drawing a direct causal link. She said she was "cautious" about attributing the entire increase solely to President Trump's comments, acknowledging that other factors could be at play even as the timing appeared highly suggestive.
The president first called for the technology to be renamed during a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on 11 September. "The use of the word artificial makes it sound fake," he told assembled world leaders. "It's not fake, it's actually amazing. But we have to be careful... welcome to the new world of super intelligence."
Internet domains are the unique, human-readable addresses that people type into their web browsers to reach websites — for example, bbc.co.uk. The .si suffix is the country code top-level domain assigned to Slovenia, and registrations are managed by the national registry body. Country code domains are typically used by businesses, organisations and individuals with ties to that nation, but they can be bought by anyone.
One likely explanation for the flood of purchases is cyber-squatting — the practice of speculatively registering domain names in the hope that they will later grow in value and can be sold at a profit. Speculators often move quickly when a term gains sudden cultural or commercial relevance, betting that brands, investors or collectors will eventually pay a premium for the address.
The potential rewards can be substantial. In 1997, Rick Schwartz, a investor widely known as "The Domain King," purchased the domain name men.com for $15,000, equivalent to about £11,300 at the time. Seven years later he sold it for $1.32 million, illustrating how a well-timed registration can generate enormous returns.
The domain surge is not the only development stemming from Trump's rebranding effort. On Tuesday, the president hosted a meeting of leading technology executives at what he described as "an extraordinary gathering" of the people "building America's Golden Age." The event underscored his administration's intensifying focus on positioning the United States at the forefront of advanced computing.
Following that meeting, Trump signed an executive order directing US government departments and agencies to begin using the terms "SI" and "Super Intelligence." Under the order, federal bodies are instructed to stop acknowledging the term AI in their communications going forward.
The directive states that SI will replace AI in "official correspondence," websites, reports and other forms of government communication. The change represents a significant shift in how the US federal government formally refers to a technology that has become central to economic policy, national security debates and international competition.
The order did not escape scrutiny, however. Images of the signatures attached to the document were mocked online after observers noticed that "United States" had been misspelt beneath President Trump's signature. The error quickly became a talking point on social media, adding an awkward footnote to an announcement intended to project authority and forward-thinking leadership.
For Slovenia's registry, the episode highlights how quickly global events can ripple through seemingly unrelated corners of the internet. Country code domains are often treated as niche national assets, but they can become unexpectedly valuable when their letters coincide with a trending acronym or phrase. The .si registry now finds itself at the centre of a speculative rush driven by American political branding.
Whether the registrations will translate into lasting value remains uncertain. Domain speculation is inherently risky, and many of the addresses purchased in September may never attract buyers. Still, the scale of the spike offers a vivid illustration of how a single speech — and a two-letter abbreviation — can move behaviour thousands of miles away.
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