Trump renamed AI. 6,000 people bought Slovenian domains in two days.

A reel doing the rounds this week says you should "get a .SI domain name for your business immediately," because the US now calls AI "super intelligence" and companies like OpenAI have already grabbed their .si names. We checked each claim against the registry and the primary sources.

Short version: the rebrand is real, the registration spike is real, and the urgency is not.

What actually happened

• 22 September. At the UN General Assembly, President Trump said the term "artificial intelligence" makes the technology sound fake and that it should be called super intelligence, or SI.
• 29 September. He signed an executive order, Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence. It directs federal agencies to use "Super Intelligence" and "SI" instead of "AI" in official communications, websites, reports and other non-statutory documents.

The order covers the federal executive branch's own wording. It says nothing about private companies, and nothing about domain names.

The rush on .si is real

.si is Slovenia's country-code domain, run by the national research network Arnes. According to the registry's figures, as reported by Foreign Policy and others:

• 2,000+ new .si registrations on the day of the UN speech, and 4,000+ the day after. For most of the past year it was about 1,000 a month.
• 10,000+ new registrations in September, pushing .si past 200,000 domains for the first time. By 29 September it was about 219,800.

For scale: .com takes about 150,000 new registrations a day. A four-digit daily number is a huge spike for Slovenia, and a rounding error for the internet.

Arnes itself is careful here. Its spokesperson said the upward trend was already there before the speech, and that talk of millions in revenue for Slovenia has no real basis: the registry fee is about €10 per domain.

"OpenAI already bought theirs": check the dates

The reel names openai.si as proof that big AI companies are moving now. We looked the domains up in the .si registry's own WHOIS on 30 September:

Every one of them was registered months or years before the rebrand. The public record shows the registrar, not the owner, so there is also no evidence that OpenAI holds openai.si at all. Brand-name domains on country codes are very often held by speculators or defensive registrars, not by the brand.

If you are thinking of buying

• Defensive registration is cheap and fine. If you have a brand worth protecting, one .si at roughly $12–17 a year costs less than a lunch. That's a reasonable hedge, not an investment.
• Speculation is the classic hype trade. Thousands of people registered speculative names in the same week, the obvious short names are gone, and the demand rests on one political branding choice that could fade, or be reversed by the next administration.
• Nobody needs yourcompany.si. Customers still type .com, and the order changes nothing for your business. If a seller tells you otherwise with a deadline attached, that is a sales pitch.

Meanwhile, in generic domains

We also track daily registrations across 1,100+ generic TLDs. This week's biggest moves, new registrations per day for 23–29 September compared with the four weeks before:

Swings this size in new generic TLDs are usually a registry price promotion starting or ending, not a shift in demand. .xyz also shed about 128,000 active domains this week, the typical pattern when cheap first-year registrations come up for renewal. We haven't confirmed the cause for each of these yet; that's the next step for this series.

.si, .ai and other country codes aren't in the daily data at all. Country registries publish statistics in their own way, some not at all, which is exactly why a view across them has been missing.