President Donald Trump’s campaign to rebrand artificial intelligence (AI) as “super intelligence” (SI) may be behind an unprecedented surge in domain name registrations in Slovenia, the country’s official national registry reported.
The initiative, which advocates for the term “super intelligence” or “SI”—the same initials used by Slovenian websites—has triggered a massive spike in demand for .si domain names. According to Register.si spokesperson Klara Herman, 44,000 web addresses with the .si suffix were registered in September, compared to fewer than 2,000 in August. This represents an astronomical increase of over 2,100%.
Describing the scale of the activity in late September as “unprecedented” compared to the previous 12 months, Herman noted that the surge stood out “very clearly” against other months in the year. However, she expressed caution about attributing the entire increase solely to President Trump’s comments. On September 30 alone, more than 11,000 new registrations were recorded.
President Trump initially called for the rebranding during his address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on September 11, arguing that the word “artificial” makes the technology sound fake. “It’s not fake, it’s actually amazing. But we have to be careful… welcome to the new world of super intelligence,” he stated.
One likely driver behind the surge is cybersquatting, where individuals speculatively register domain names in anticipation of their future value. A historical precedent occurred in 1997 when Rick Schwartz, dubbed “The Domain King,” purchased the domain men.com for $15,000 and later sold it for $1.32 million.
During a subsequent meeting with top technology executives, which he described as an “extraordinary gathering” of the figures “building America’s Golden Age,” President Trump signed an executive order. This order instructs US government departments and agencies to replace the term “AI” with “SI” or “Super Intelligence” in all official correspondence, websites, reports, and other forms of communication.
Despite the official push, images of the executive order’s signature page faced online mockery after it was discovered that the words “United States” had been spelled incorrectly beneath the president’s signature.