The most disloyal among all AI domains and yet perhaps among the most premium ones as well — AI.com has found a new product to back.
Users visiting AI.com are now redirected away to DeepSeek’s website.
The domain was first registered all the way back in 1993 when most people wouldn’t have imagined much about how generative AI looks today. Its current registrar service is listed to be SquareSpace and the registrar entity is seemingly based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, according to WHOIS information.
It doesn’t seem to be the case of DeepSeek having bought the domain, as per the registration information available. If speculating, the Chinese company may either be leasing it or the person who owns the domain may just be a fan or even otherwise doing the 301 redirect in their own interest without any exchange of payment.
Yet, why is the event important enough for us to be talking about it? Because it reflects something about the state of AI.
AI.com as a domain first gained attention when it began redirecting users to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This was quite helpful, as chat.openai.com as the was the URL to access the service at the time was a bit of a mouthful for some.
Yet, when the winds in the race for AI developments changed, so did this domain’s loyalties.
When Sam Altman’s arch-nemesis in the tech world, Elon Musk, rolled out his own generative AI product Grok via xAI, AI.com shifted its redirection away to it.
Grok was gaining quite a bit of traction at the time, and some like me would argue has outdone OpenAI on some fronts, especially when it comes to image generation models.
A shift in its loyalties seem to have yet again and AI.com has joined the (long) list of Elon Musk’s exes.
DeepSeek has caused a firestorm in the world of AI, with its reasoning model R1 surpassing the benchmarks of OpenAI’s o1, while being trained at a fraction of the costs.
Let alone just climbing to the top of U.S. iPhone charts, the company’s product got so many users that it had to restrict signups and suffered DDoS attacks.
So, there clearly seems to be a pattern with AI.com. Whatever is the hottest, most trendy generative AI in the world at the time, you bet the domain would redirect to it — until perhaps a day comes when it is used to rope unsuspecting users into a cryptocurrency rug-pull.