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President Donald Trump's campaign to rebrand artificial intelligence as "super intelligence" appears to have triggered an unexpected side effect thousands of miles away from Washington — a dramatic spike in website registrations in the small Central European nation of Slovenia.
According to the country's official national domain registry, registrations for web addresses ending in .si surged to approximately 44,000 in September, a staggering increase from fewer than 2,000 recorded in August. That represents a jump of more than 2,100% in a single month, an anomaly that registry officials describe as without precedent in recent memory.
The connection lies in the initials. Trump has been advocating that AI be referred to as SI — short for "super intelligence" — which happens to be the same two-letter suffix that identifies Slovenian internet domains. As the president's rhetoric gained international attention, it seems a wave of opportunistic buyers rushed to scoop up .si web addresses.
Klara Herman, a spokesperson for Register.si, confirmed the scale of the activity, noting that the final days of September were particularly extraordinary. On 30 September alone, roughly 11,000 new .si registrations were recorded — more than five times the total for the entire previous month. Herman said the September figures stood out "very clearly" when compared with every other month over the past year.
She was, however, careful not to draw a definitive line between the registration boom and Trump's comments alone. While the timing is striking, Herman said she remained "cautious" about attributing the entire increase to a single political speech, acknowledging that other factors could be at play.
Trump first publicly floated the renaming during an address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on 11 September. "The use of the word artificial makes it sound fake," he told world leaders. "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 argument rests on a semantic objection: that "artificial" carries connotations of something manufactured, inauthentic or lesser, when in his view the technology represents a genuinely transformative leap forward for humanity. By rebranding it as "super intelligence," he appears to be signalling that these systems surpass ordinary human capability rather than merely imitating it.
Internet domains are the unique, human-readable addresses that users type into a browser to reach a website — for example, bbc.co.uk. Each country has its own two-letter country-code top-level domain, and .si has belonged to Slovenia since the early days of the commercial internet. Domains are bought and sold like property, and their value can fluctuate wildly depending on shifting cultural, commercial or political trends.
One widely accepted explanation for sudden registration surges of this kind is cybersquatting. In this practice, individuals or investors speculatively purchase domain names they believe may later become valuable, hoping to resell them at a significant profit. The phenomenon has produced famous windfalls over the years. In 1997, Rick Schwartz — a figure widely known in the industry as "The Domain King" — acquired men.com for $15,000, equivalent to roughly £11,300 at the time. Seven years later, he sold it for $1.32 million, a return that has since become a staple of domain-investing lore.
The possibility that speculators now see similar potential in .si addresses — perhaps betting that "SI" becomes a globally recognised shorthand for a technology sector worth trillions — would help explain the sheer volume of purchases in such a short window. If super intelligence becomes the dominant term in policy, media and industry discourse, the two letters could acquire substantial brand value.
Trump's rebranding effort moved from rhetoric to formal policy on Tuesday, when he hosted a gathering of leading technology executives at what he described as "an extraordinary gathering" of the people "building America's Golden Age." During the event, he signed an executive order directing US government departments and agencies to adopt the terms "SI" and "Super Intelligence" in place of AI.
Under the order, federal bodies are instructed to stop acknowledging the term artificial intelligence and to use SI in official correspondence, on government websites, in reports and in other forms of public communication. The directive amounts to a sweeping linguistic overhaul across the US federal bureaucracy — an unusual step, given that terminology in technical and scientific fields is rarely dictated by executive decree.
The signing did not go entirely smoothly, however. Images of the order's signature page circulated widely online after observers noticed that "United States" had been misspelled beneath President Trump's signature. The error quickly became the subject of mockery on social media, overshadowing coverage of the order's substance for many users.
The Slovenian registry's figures nonetheless offer a striking illustration of how quickly global events — even those with no direct connection to a country — can ripple through obscure corners of the digital economy. A speech delivered in New York, a two-letter abbreviation, and a small nation's internet infrastructure have become unexpectedly intertwined.
Whether the surge in .si registrations proves to be a lasting trend or a short-lived speculative frenzy remains to be seen. What is clear is that the debate over what to call artificial intelligence is no longer confined to Silicon Valley boardrooms or academic journals. It has entered the realms of international politics, government policy and, now, the speculative market for web addresses — with consequences that few could have anticipated when Trump stepped up to the podium at the United Nations.
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