President Trump's order directing federal agencies to say Super Intelligence instead of AI arrived with a side effect: Slovenia's .si country-code domain, long a quiet corner of the internet, has been bid up by investors betting the abbreviation SI will catch on. An investor now alleges insiders bought thousands of those domains in advance. The allegation is unproven and the White House denies it. The registration records show an unexplained build-up months before Trump's first post, and they fit more than one explanation.
Unexplained: Registrations ran above the registry's baseline in May and June, months before Trump's first post. Register.si couldn't identify a cause.
Alleged: Insiders bought thousands of .si domains in the 60 days before the announcement, within about 12,000 AI- or MAGA-related names newly registered or resold, and profited.
Unproven: Any link between the purchases and advance knowledge. Snopes couldn't verify one, and the White House denies it, which settles nothing either way.
The Order and the Rush
Trump floated renaming artificial intelligence on Truth Social on September 19 and used the term Super Intelligence at the UN on September 22. On September 29 he signed Executive Order 14434, Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence, directing executive departments and agencies, to the maximum extent permitted by law, to use Super Intelligence and SI instead of artificial intelligence and AI in official correspondence, websites, reports, and other non-statutory documents. The order doesn't require private companies to change their branding. WorkplaceAI covered the rename's origins last month, when the name Trump announced at the UN turned out not to be among his poll's choices.
Domain registrations moved with the announcements. Domaintechnik's data shows roughly 100 new .si domains a day earlier in September. Register.si's figures show fewer than 1,000 on September 20, the day after the poll, and more than 4,000 on September 23. Netcraft found .si registrations overtook .ai in the 25 hours after the UN remarks. Domaintechnik counted 17,621 new .si domains from September 23 to 29 against 7,209 new .ai domains. Register.si recorded about 11,000 new registrations on September 30, the day after the order, and about 46,000 for the month, against under 4,000 in August.
The Allegation
Crypto investor and policy consultant Adam Cochran laid out the allegation in a 15-post thread on X on September 30. He says registrations rose in June, passing 400 on June 24 alone, and that more than 7,000 new .si domains were registered in July, alongside what he calls the first spike in .si aftermarket sales. AI-related names began selling for tens of thousands of dollars, he says, and some were relisted for millions, with Build.si offered for more than $14 million. Asking prices aren't sale prices, TechCrunch noted.
He says he found about 12,000 AI- or MAGA-related names newly registered or resold before the announcement, and that insiders bought thousands of domains in the 60 days before it. His opening post says insiders profited by millions of dollars, and his summary post says hundreds of millions. He called it a "criminal plot" to enrich the Trump family, noted Slovenia's connection to Melania Trump, and predicted that a future Congress will look at who bought the domains.
He argues the buyers differ from ordinary squatters, who buy bulk common words, because they paid high aftermarket prices for names that began selling at the same time. He also expects federal agencies and AI companies to buy .si names to please Trump.
How Far in Advance? The Records Don't Say
The advance-purchase claim has a checkable core, because registries record when each domain was created. Public records can't show who owns a domain, though, since Register.si limits ownership information for individual holders. The timing is verifiable in principle. The buyers' identities and what they knew are not. The thread includes screenshots that may show some of the data, but no full domain list with creation dates has been published for independent review. Snopes said the May and June spikes appeared to be Cochran's main evidence, and Gizmodo reports he also points to names that suggest political sympathy, such as 1776.si. Gizmodo called the evidence circumstantial, and Cochran didn't respond when Snopes asked him for his.
Reports of the thread differ because the thread uses different windows and measures. Its posts cite 400 registrations in a day in June, more than 7,000 registrations in July, more than 10,000 AI-related terms registered over the last few months, about 12,000 names newly registered or resold before the announcement, and thousands of domains bought in the last 60 days. Outlets quoted different posts, and some merged them into versions such as 12,000 registrations in June and July. Key data sits in screenshots, which text summaries drop.
Two points follow. The 12,000 figure includes names that changed hands, so it isn't a count of new registrations. And the thread's 60-day windows are ambiguous: One post measures 60 days before the announcement, while the summary says the past 60 days, which on September 30 would include the surge after the poll.
The registry's history shows how unusual the build-up was. The .si zone crossed 150,000 domains in 2022 and stood at about 155,000 in May 2024. By June 2026 it was 186,159, and an archive from September 4 showed about 190,000. Register.si's monthly chart, as described by Snopes, shows fewer than 2,500 new registrations a month from July 2025, then about 5,000 in May 2026 and again in June. Neither Snopes nor other reporting gives a figure for July. August was 3,515 in the registry's monthly data, though a spokeswoman told the BBC fewer than 2,000, and September was 46,066.
Register.si couldn't identify a cause for the May and June spikes. It told Snopes it had already seen registrations rising in the months before Trump's announcement and that other EU country-code domains showed a similar trend, a claim WorkplaceAI hasn't checked against those registries.
Dynadot attributes the May jump to a prominent sale, Recursive.si at $20,000. Domain Name Wire reported on June 11 that investors were already buying .si names as shorthand for superintelligence, and that only two of 35 public sales from January to early June went to end users. One buyer accounted for more than 40% of those sales. That fits speculation. It also fits the pattern the allegation describes, and the registry data can't tell the two apart.
After the poll, the data shows speculators reacting to public information. Netcraft found that about 52% of the .si names it detected being registered through Dynadot between the September 19 poll and the September 22 UN speech were listed for resale by September 23. That doesn't show how many sold. Netcraft's October 1 follow-up found the sharpest jump after the order came through OpusDNS, a registrar that serves resellers and appears to have begun offering .si on September 23.
What the Evidence Shows
Snopes reviewed the claim on October 1 and found it unproven. It couldn't verify that Trump or his associates profited from the purchases or knew about the order in advance, and the White House denied the claim. Unproven is not disproven, and a denial is a statement, not evidence. Public records can't rule out purchases made through third parties, because Register.si limits ownership information and registrars can keep account records private.
Records that could settle it exist: registrar account and payment records, and the proceeds from resales. Obtaining them would take an investigation with subpoena power, which is what Cochran is urging.
Netcraft's explanation is speculation, and the data after the poll supports it: Domain investors had been betting for months that SI would catch on as shorthand for superintelligence, and the term Super Intelligence predates Trump's use of it. Speculation explains the volume. It doesn't exclude a smaller group of advance buyers, which is the claim at issue. The stakes explain the appetite: Short, brandable domains can fetch large sums. AI.com reportedly sold for $70 million and Voice.com for $30 million.
The Follow-Up Is Thin on Details
On October 4, Trump announced a Super Intelligence Force, an AI task force he says will promote American AI dominance while protecting American lives and interests. ABC News noted the announcement didn't outline any specific action or oversight authority, even as some tech CEOs call for federal regulation. It follows a White House meeting last week at which Trump said he and six companies signed what he called a constitution setting standards for how the companies will police themselves.
Bottom Line
The months before the September announcement are the open question, when .si domain registrations ran above baseline in May and June. No July figure has been reported, and August's total is disputed. Although the registry released aggregate data showing spikes, the domain-level records showing who registered which names and when have not been revealed. At this point, the entire story is murky, and unless those concrete facts are surfaced, there is no clear evidence to prove or disprove the allegations.
Sources: AI Pulse · Compliance Watch · workplaceai.ai. The executive order and timeline: International Business Times UK and Yahoo News, with the order's title and number from the White House text as cited by Register.Domains and CellCog. Registration data: Register.si statistics as reported by Netcraft (September 24 and October 1, 2026), Domain Name Wire, CircleID (citing Domaintechnik), TechCrunch (October 2, 2026), and Snopes, including Register.si's monthly chart as described by Snopes; Dynadot, citing ARNES registry statistics; the 2022 total and the June 2026 total from Register.si statistics as cited by Wikipedia; the May 2024 total from a domain-investor forum summary of registry figures (NamePros), a weaker source. Early-2026 investor activity: Domain Name Wire (June 11, 2026). Adam Cochran's allegations: his September 30, 2026 thread on X, read through Thread Reader App and reported by Protos, International Business Times, and Gizmodo. Screenshots embedded in the thread were not available to WorkplaceAI, and only part of the thread's text could be retrieved. Fact-check: Snopes (October 1, 2026). Domain sale prices: aiweekly.co. The Super Intelligence Force and the self-policing meeting: ABC News (October 4, 2026). WorkplaceAI takes no position on the allegation, which remains unproven. Every figure and claim above is attributed to its original reporting; none is a WorkplaceAI study.