Trump’s AI name change sparks insider domain trading claims

US President Donald Trump’s executive order to rename Artificial Intelligence (AI) as Super Intelligence (SI) was likely used by insiders to make “hundreds of millions of dollars” selling SI domain names in advance.

This is according to independent journalist Adam Cochran who spotted a spike in “.si” domain name registrations across June and July in the lead-up to Trump’s SI rebrand announcement on September 19.

AI- and MAGA-related .si domains were being bought for tens of thousands of dollars and then listed for millions. The re-listed domain (Build.si) is on offer for over $14 million.

Cochran says he found 12,000 of these domains registered before the announcement, and that before July, “95% of all .si domains had been non-English.”

Cochran believes that yesterday’s executive order will spur federal agencies and AI tech companies to buy up .si domain names to appease Trump.

Because of this, Cochran claims that there’s likely a group of insiders linked to the Trump administration that used their knowledge of the upcoming executive order to buy up domains.

Unlike domain squatters that “purchase bulk domain names of common words,” Cochran says the insiders are buying “overpriced aftermarket domains which started to sell around the same time.”

US to ignore AI and acknowledge Super Intelligence

Trump’s executive order claims AI is an outdated term that, when coined years ago, could not envision AI’s ability to “amplify human ingenuity and unlock new forms of creativity.”

As the technology improves, Trump believes that SI is a more fitting description to adopt going forward.

Hours before, Trump met with Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, X’s Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and Google’s Sundar Pichai, for an AI summit.

The tech execs signed a “morally binding” accord on AI safety, which came with a spelling mistake under Trump’s signature.

Interestingly, the US government will no longer acknowledge AI after the executive order, so it’s safe to assume that OpenAI and XAI will probably be looking into their own rebrand as well.