US President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming Artificial Intelligence as Super Intelligence has set off allegations that advance knowledge of the move was used to profit from .si domain names.
According to Protos, independent journalist Adam Cochran said registrations of .si domains rose across June and July before Trump’s September 19 announcement of the SI rebrand. He argued that insiders likely made hundreds of millions of dollars by buying the domains ahead of time and then reselling them at far higher prices.
12,000 domains were registered before the announcement, Cochran says
Cochran said he found 12,000 .si domains registered before the public announcement. Before July, he said, “95% of all .si domains had been non-English.”
He also said AI- and MAGA-related .si domains were being bought for tens of thousands of dollars and then listed for millions. One example cited in the report was Build.si, which is listed for more than $14 million.
In a post on X, Cochran wrote: “Trump’s ‘Super Intelligence’ Scandal: I believe Trump’s ‘SI’ Executive Order was ANOTHER criminal plot to enrich the Trump family. Insiders seem to have profited MILLIONS off of .si domain names before his Truth Social posts.”
Cochran said the pattern differed from typical domain squatters who “purchase bulk domain names of common words.” Instead, he said the buyers were acquiring “overpriced aftermarket domains which started to sell around the same time.”
Executive order says AI is outdated
Protos said Trump’s executive order describes AI as an outdated term that, when it was coined years ago, could not anticipate the technology’s ability to “amplify human ingenuity and unlock new forms of creativity.” Trump said Super Intelligence is now a more suitable term.
Cochran said the order issued yesterday could push federal agencies and AI companies to buy .si domains to appease Trump. Based on that, he claimed there was likely a group of insiders tied to the Trump administration that used knowledge of the pending order to acquire the domains in advance.
Tech executives met Trump hours before the order
Hours before the executive order, Trump met Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, X owner Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai at an AI summit.
The report said the executives signed a “morally binding” accord on AI safety. It also said the document included a spelling mistake beneath Trump’s signature.
Report says the US government will stop acknowledging AI
Protos also said that after the order, the US government would no longer acknowledge the term AI. On that basis, the report said it was “safe to assume” that OpenAI and xAI would probably look at their own rebrands as well.
The allegations over .si domain trading cited in the article come from Cochran’s public claims and analysis. The Protos report did not cite any official investigation result.