AI.com might be the most expensive two letters on the internet—and a excellent snapshot of how wild the AI gold rush has become.
Kris Marszalek, CEO and co-founder of Crypto.com, just bought the domain AI.com for around $70 million (about Rp 1.17 trillion). That instantly puts it in the conversation as one of the priciest domain deals in history.
The bigger question for anyone who actually cares about tech (and not just headlines): what are you really buying for $70 million in 2026?
Two Letters, One of the Priciest Domains Ever
AI.com is about as clean as it gets for branding. Two characters, a .com TLD, and a buzzword that everyone from chipmakers to dating apps is trying to slap on their pitch decks.
Domain names are just human-readable pointers to IP addresses—nothing magical there. But scarcity is real: there’s exactly one AI.com, and Marszalek now owns it.
The reported $70 million price tag pushes it into rare territory. For context, Cars.com was once valued as an intangible asset at around $872.3 million back in 2014. While that wasn’t a straight cash domain sale like this one, it shows how seriously companies treat ultra-generic, high-intent domains with mainstream appeal.
AI.com is the same idea, updated for 2026. In the late 90s, it was all about generic commerce domains. Now, it’s the AI keyword lottery.
Why Crypto.com’s CEO Wants a Second Empire
Despite the eye-watering price, AI.com isn’t replacing Crypto.com’s main identity. Marszalek says he’ll be running two separate entities: Crypto.com and AI.com.
Crypto.com stays in its lane as a crypto exchange platform. Trading, tokens, and everything that lives and dies on speculative markets.
AI.com, meanwhile, is supposed to be a new company focused on AI agents—software-based autonomous agents that don’t just answer prompts but take action on your behalf.
So this isn’t just a domain flip. It’s a pivot: from crypto speculation to AI automation, without abandoning the original business. In other words, diversification—with a $70 million .com as the front door.
AI Agents: Ambitious Pitch, High-Risk Reality
According to Marszalek, AI.com will be a platform for autonomous software agents. Not just chatbots that give you answers, but entities that:
- Manage tasks
- Send messages
- Run workflows across apps
- Build projects
- Trade stocks
- Even update your dating app profiles
This is the logical next step in AI hype: not just talking to an assistant, but letting it actually touch your accounts, data, and money.
In theory, this is powerful. Imagine telling an agent: “Reschedule my meetings, move my investment allocation out of volatile positions, and refresh my dating profile photos,” and it quietly gets everything done.
In practice, this is a minefield. You’re basically handing over control hooks into your digital life and financial footprint to a software platform and trusting it not to:
- Misinterpret your intent
- Execute bad trades
- Send the wrong messages
- Leak or misuse extremely sensitive personal data
AI.com is being pitched as a secure system, with agents operating inside a setup that uses user-owned encryption keys. That’s the right thing to say in 2026, when everyone is side-eyeing data collection and model training. But there’s a big gap between promising encryption and delivering an end-to-end secure, auditable system that everyday people don’t accidentally misconfigure.
Security, Privacy, and a Massive Trust Problem
The most important part of this whole story isn’t the domain price—it’s the power AI.com wants to have.
If AI agents are going to execute trades, trigger cross-app workflows, and modify your online identities, you’re effectively creating a new attack surface that connects finance, productivity, and personal life in one place.
Marszalek claims these agents will operate in a secure environment using user key–based encryption. That’s promising on paper. User-controlled keys usually mean you have at least some guarantee that data access requires your cryptographic approval.
But people in the real world:
- Reuse passwords
- Lose keys
- Click random links
- Authorize things they don’t fully understand
The more powerful an AI agent platform is, the more damage a single compromise can cause. A stolen session or hijacked key doesn’t just leak a few emails—it could trigger trades, message contacts, and rewrite your public identity across apps.
For a company already associated with risk-heavy crypto markets, convincing users that this new AI platform is safe won’t be trivial. A giant domain and a Super Bowl ad won’t fix a single security incident if one happens.
Super Bowl Ad + $70M Domain = Old-School Playbook
The timing of AI.com’s launch was matched to a Super Bowl LX commercial in the US. Buy the massive domain, buy the massive ad, blast the brand into the mainstream. Very 2010s Silicon Valley energy.
On one hand, it’s smart. The general public doesn’t care about model architectures, vector databases, or encryption primitives. They remember simple, loud things: a short domain, a catchy ad, a big promise.
On the other hand, the AI space is already drowning in big promises. Everyone claims their agents will change how you work, live, and socialize. Most users just want something that doesn’t hallucinate key details or break when an app UI changes.
AI.com is trying to jump the line by owning the most obvious domain and attaching itself to the biggest ad stage around. Whether the underlying product can justify that spend is a completely different question.
What This Means for the AI and Domain Markets
From a domain perspective, AI.com is a signal: the .com era isn’t dead, even with a flood of new TLDs like .meme and everything else ICANN keeps greenlighting. Generic, high-intent .coms are still assets people will throw tens of millions at.
From an AI perspective, this move is a bet that the next phase of the market is:
- Less about chat interfaces
- More about autonomous execution
- Deeply intertwined with finance, productivity, and identity
It also hints at where crypto and AI narratives are merging: encrypted, user-key-controlled autonomous systems that can touch money and data. It’s a neat story. It’s also one that can go badly if execution is sloppy or if regulation catches up faster than expected.
Right now, AI.com is mostly a symbol: of how expensive hype can get, and how eager founders are to pivot from one hot sector (crypto) into the next (AI agents).
Whether it becomes more than that will depend on boring, unsexy details: security audits, governance models, user controls, and how safely these agents are allowed to plug into your digital life.
Until we see that, AI.com is a $70 million question mark with a great URL.
Check back soon as this story develops.