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President Donald Trump's campaign to overhaul the language used to describe artificial intelligence appears to have triggered an unexpected side effect thousands of miles away in Slovenia, where the country's official domain registry has reported an extraordinary spike in website registrations linked to the initials of his proposed new terminology.
According to Register.si, the national registry responsible for managing Slovenia's .si internet suffix, approximately 44,000 web addresses ending in .si were registered during September. That figure stands in stark contrast to fewer than 2,000 registrations recorded in August, representing an increase of more than 2,100 percent in a single month.
Klara Herman, a spokesperson for Register.si, described the scale of activity seen in late September as "unprecedented" when compared with the previous twelve months of registry data. She noted that the surge was concentrated toward the end of the month, with 11,000 new registrations recorded on 30 September alone.
The timing of the spike coincides closely with remarks made by President Trump at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on 11 September, during which he called for the technology widely known as artificial intelligence to be rebranded as "super intelligence."
In his address, the president argued that the word "artificial" carries misleading connotations. "The use of the word artificial makes it sound fake," he told assembled 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 proposed rebranding carries a notable linguistic consequence: the abbreviation for super intelligence, SI, is identical to the country code top-level domain assigned to Slovenia. Internet domains function as the human-readable addresses that users type into browsers to reach websites, such as bbc.co.uk, and country-specific suffixes like .si are administered by designated national registries.
Herman said the September figures stood out "very clearly" against every other month of the year, though she remained cautious about attributing the entire increase solely to the president's comments. She did not rule out other contributing factors, and analysts have suggested that speculative purchasing activity may also be at play.
One widely cited explanation is cyber-squatting, a practice in which individuals register domain names in the hope that they will later appreciate in value and can be resold at a profit. The strategy has produced notable windfalls in the past. In 1997, Rick Schwartz, a figure widely 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.
The confusion generated by Trump's terminology may have made .si addresses suddenly appear more valuable to speculators, particularly if the abbreviation gains traction in official American usage. Domains tied to high-profile political or technological shifts have historically attracted opportunistic buyers hoping to capitalise on public interest.
On Tuesday, the president hosted a gathering of leading technology executives at the White House, describing the meeting 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, the new terminology is to replace AI in official correspondence, government websites, reports and other forms of communication. The directive effectively instructs federal bodies to stop acknowledging the older term in their formal output, a move that could ripple through procurement documents, research grants and public-facing materials.
The executive order did not escape scrutiny online, however. Images of the signature page circulated on social media, where users pointed out that "United States" had been misspelled beneath President Trump's signature. The error quickly became a subject of mockery, adding an awkward footnote to a ceremony intended to showcase American technological leadership.
For Slovenia, the episode represents an unusual collision between global tech policy and a small national internet namespace. The .si registry is not accustomed to handling tens of thousands of registrations in a matter of weeks, and the sudden demand may prompt scrutiny of whether the new addresses are being acquired for legitimate purposes or stockpiled by speculators.
Domain industry observers note that country-code registries often see periodic bursts of activity, but rarely on this scale. A more than twenty-fold increase in monthly registrations is the kind of anomaly that typically signals a cultural or political event rather than organic growth in local internet usage.
Whether the trend persists will likely depend on how firmly the "super intelligence" terminology takes hold in Washington and whether the SI abbreviation becomes embedded in public discourse. If it does, the value of .si domains could continue to attract interest from buyers betting that the overlap is more than a passing coincidence.
For now, Register.si is treating September as an outlier that demands attention. Herman's measured response reflects the difficulty of proving causation in domain markets, where speculation, news cycles and automated purchasing tools can all distort demand. But the correlation between the president's UN speech and Slovenia's registration records is difficult to dismiss entirely.
The story also illustrates how quickly a rhetorical shift at the highest levels of American politics can produce tangible economic effects elsewhere. A decision about what to call a technology, made in a speech in New York, has apparently translated into thousands of purchases in a European registry within weeks.
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