Trump's Push to Rename AI Sparks Record Surge in Slovenian Domain Registrations

President Donald Trump's campaign to rebrand artificial intelligence as "super intelligence" appears to have triggered an unexpected side effect thousands of miles away: a record-breaking wave of domain name registrations in Slovenia.

According to the country's official national registry, registrations of web addresses ending in the .si suffix — the country code assigned to Slovenia — skyrocketed in September. Register.si spokesperson Klara Herman said approximately 44,000 .si domains were registered during the month, compared with fewer than 2,000 in August. That represents an increase of more than 2,100 percent.

Herman described the surge as "unprecedented" when measured against activity over the previous 12 months. She noted that registrations during late September stood out "very clearly" from other months of the year. On 30 September alone, she said, 11,000 new registrations were recorded — a single-day figure that dwarfs the entire previous month's total.

The timing of the spike aligns closely with Trump's remarks at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on 11 September. During his address, the president called for the technology commonly known as artificial intelligence to instead be referred to as super intelligence, arguing the existing terminology misrepresents what the technology actually is.

"The use of the word artificial makes it sound fake," Trump said during the speech. "It's not fake, it's actually amazing. But we have to be careful... welcome to the new world of super intelligence."

The president's preferred phrasing carries an important detail: the abbreviation for "super intelligence" is "SI" — which also happens to be the internet country code for Slovenia. Internet domain names are the unique, human-readable addresses that users type into web browsers to reach websites, such as bbc.co.uk. For Slovenia, every domestic web address ends in .si.

Herman said she remained "cautious" about attributing the entire increase solely to the president's comments, acknowledging that other factors could be at play. Nevertheless, the correlation in timing is difficult to ignore, and the scale of the jump has drawn attention from domain industry observers.

One frequently cited explanation for sudden bursts of domain purchasing is cyber-squatting, a speculative practice in which individuals register names they believe could become valuable later and then resell them at a profit. Domain flipping has a long and lucrative history. In 1997, Rick Schwartz — known in the industry as "The Domain King" — purchased men.com for $15,000, equivalent to roughly £11,300 at the time. Seven years later, he sold it for $1.32 million, illustrating how sharply domain values can appreciate when demand shifts.

Trump has continued to promote the rebrand beyond his UN speech. On Tuesday, he 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 brought together prominent figures from the US tech sector as the administration presses ahead with its technology agenda.

During that session, the president signed an executive order directing US government departments and agencies to adopt the terms "SI" and "Super Intelligence" in their work. Under the order, federal bodies are instructed to stop acknowledging the term AI. The directive states that SI will replace AI in official correspondence, government websites, reports, and other forms of communication.

The order was not universally well received online, however. Images of the signature page circulated on social media and were mocked after observers noticed that "United States" had been misspelled beneath the president's signature. The error quickly became a talking point, undercutting the rollout of the very directive intended to formalise the new terminology across the federal government.

For Slovenia, the episode has produced a curious collision between American political branding and the mechanics of the global internet. Because country-code domains are allocated by national registries rather than chosen for their semantic meaning, Slovenia's .si suffix has suddenly acquired an unintended association with one of the most closely watched technology debates in the world.

Whether the September spike proves to be a lasting trend or a one-off speculative flurry remains to be seen. Domain registrations can be driven by short-term hype, and many of the newly purchased .si addresses may simply sit unused while their owners wait to see whether the "SI" branding takes hold. But registry data suggests that, for at least one month, a presidential speech about the future of artificial intelligence translated into tangible — and measurable — activity in a small European nation's internet infrastructure.

The story also highlights how quickly global events can ripple through seemingly unrelated markets. A phrase coined on a UN stage in New York became, within weeks, a factor in registration statistics maintained by a national registry in Ljubljana. For now, Herman's assessment that the numbers were "unprecedented" stands as the clearest evidence that Trump's rebranding effort has reached well beyond Washington.