ai.com

February 9, 2026

What AI.com Is Right Now (February 2026)

If you type ai.com into a browser today, you don’t land on a generic directory or a simple redirect anymore. It’s presenting itself as a consumer AI product: a place where you can create an “agent” that can operate a computer and carry out tasks across apps, not just chat back answers. The homepage messaging is explicitly about autonomous agents doing real-world work, and it’s positioned as a beta product with usernames you can claim.

This matters because the domain itself is the whole story. AI.com is one of the shortest, most memorable addresses on the internet for anything related to artificial intelligence. When a name is that clean, people assume it’s an “official” front door to the category, even when it isn’t.

The $70 Million Domain Purchase and Why It’s a Big Deal

In early February 2026, multiple outlets reported that Kris Marszalek (Crypto.com co-founder/CEO) bought AI.com for $70 million, paid entirely in cryptocurrency, with broker Larry Fischer involved in the deal. The Financial Times framed it as the highest publicly disclosed domain sale price and tied it directly to launching a consumer AI agent product promoted via a Super Bowl ad.

A $70M domain sounds irrational until you view it like a category-defining billboard that never comes down. You’re not just buying traffic. You’re buying:

  • instant recall (people remember “ai.com” without trying),
  • implied authority (a lot of users assume the shortest domain is the “main” one),
  • and a permanent advantage in word-of-mouth sharing.

It’s also a signal. Spending that much tells investors, partners, and competitors the plan is not a side experiment.

What the Product Claims to Do

The marketing around the launch describes AI.com as an “autonomous AI agent” you can generate in a few clicks, meant to do practical tasks on your behalf: organizing work, sending messages, taking actions across apps, building projects, and so on.

That’s a specific slice of the AI market: “agentic” systems that don’t stop at advice. They try to complete workflows. In practice, products in this space usually hinge on a few hard problems:

  • Tool access: Can the agent actually interact with your apps reliably, or does it break on login screens, captchas, and weird UI states?
  • Permissions and security: If it can “do anything you can do,” then it can also do things you didn’t mean it to do. Guardrails become the product.
  • Reliability under pressure: Agents are fragile when websites change layouts or when steps aren’t perfectly predictable.
  • User trust: People will test it with low-stakes tasks first. If it fails there, they won’t hand it anything important.

AI.com is pitching simplicity for non-technical users, which is the right direction if the goal is mass adoption—but it also raises the bar. Consumers have less patience for fiddly setup.

The Super Bowl Launch, Traffic Spikes, and the Reality Check

Launching during the Super Bowl is basically paying for a stress test. According to reporting after the game, AI.com crashed from traffic after its Super Bowl ad aired, with notes about extremely high demand and rate limits.

This is common now. Big ad moments push people from “I’m curious” to “I’m clicking right now,” and even well-funded platforms can buckle. The upside is that a crash can function as proof of interest. The downside is that many users won’t come back a second time, especially if the product category already feels crowded.

Why AI.com Has Been Confusing for Years

For a long time, AI.com was famous mostly because it would redirect to different high-profile AI destinations depending on who controlled it at the moment. Various reports across the last few years tracked periods where it pointed to major AI brands and projects rather than hosting its own product.

That history trained people to treat AI.com like a signpost rather than a company. So if the new owners want it to become a destination brand, they need consistency. The fastest way to lose that chance is to keep changing what it is every few months.

The Business Logic: Owning the “Front Door” to a Category

The strategic argument (laid out bluntly in reporting) is that assets like AI.com are hard to substitute. If you’re trying to build a mainstream consumer product, distribution is everything. A domain like this is distribution plus brand in one purchase.

But the domain doesn’t solve the hardest part: product-market fit. AI agents are still early. Users like the idea of “do it for me,” but they also get nervous the moment an agent asks for credentials, payment access, or permissions that feel too broad.

So the real question is whether AI.com can land on a version of agent automation that feels:

  • safe enough,
  • obvious enough,
  • and useful enough that normal people keep it around.

What to Watch Next

A few practical signals will tell you whether AI.com becomes a durable platform or a short-lived splash:

  1. Onboarding friction: If it takes more than a minute or two to get a first success, retention will be rough.
  2. Transparent control: Users want to see what the agent is about to do, and be able to stop it cleanly.
  3. Clear boundaries: “Any task you might do” is broad. The winning consumer version will likely narrow it into a handful of repeatable jobs people actually want automated.
  4. Pricing that matches trust: If it’s expensive, people will demand reliability. If it’s cheap/free, the company needs a sustainable model that doesn’t push risky monetization.

None of that is solved by the domain. But the domain gives them the one advantage nobody else can copy.

Key takeaways

  • AI.com is now positioned as a consumer “autonomous agent” platform, not just a redirect.
  • Kris Marszalek (Crypto.com) reportedly bought AI.com for $70M, paid in crypto, making it the biggest publicly disclosed domain sale in this category.
  • The Super Bowl launch drove massive attention—and reports say the site crashed under traffic shortly after the ad aired.
  • The core challenge isn’t awareness. It’s whether the agent works reliably and earns enough trust for real tasks.

FAQ

Is AI.com owned by OpenAI?

No. Recent reporting ties ownership and launch to Kris Marszalek of Crypto.com, and AI.com’s own company news page also identifies him as founder of the platform.

Why would someone pay $70 million for a domain name?

Because it compresses branding and distribution into one asset: it’s short, memorable, and feels “official” to users. Reporting also notes the deal was positioned as a strategic investment with a long time horizon.

What does AI.com actually do?

It claims you can create a personal AI agent that can operate on your behalf across tasks like messaging, organizing work, and executing actions in apps, rather than only answering questions.

Did AI.com really crash after the Super Bowl ad?

Reporting on Super Bowl ad performance said AI.com experienced a crash/outage tied to traffic and technical limits, and then came back.

Why did AI.com used to redirect to other AI sites?

Over the past few years, multiple reports documented AI.com pointing at different AI companies/products at different times, which is typical when a valuable domain is being leased, redirected, or transferred between owners.