What is AI.com? Mysterious website asks for people’s credit card info after Super Bowl ad
On the heels of its intriguing Super Bowl ad, AI.com is garnering all sorts of interest—so much, in fact, that the company’s website crashed as Super Bowl viewers scrambled to see what the company no one has heard of was all about.
The new AI platform, founded by Crypto.com CEO and cofounder Kris Marszalek, reportedly spent a whopping $85 million on the Super Bowl spot, only to garner such a heavy volume of traffic that he had to post on X: “Insane traffic levels. We prepared for scale, but not for THIS,” followed by three fire emoji.
That 30-second commerical, which ran during the coveted fourth-quarter ad slot, encouraged fans to go to the site and create an AI handle, lured by the promise it would “perform real-world tasks for the good of humanity.”
What exactly does that mean? According to the company’s press release: “With a few clicks, anyone can now generate a private, personal AI agent that doesn’t just answer questions, but actually operates on the user’s behalf—organizing work, sending messages, executing actions across apps, building projects, and more,” the company said.
The company also asks people to “join now to claim your unique ai.com/username,” which requires entering credit card information to allegedly “verify that you’re a human” in order to secure a handle.
Fast Company has reached out to AI.com for more details on why a credit card is required for verification.
However, many who scrambled to the site were left with more questions than answers. One X user wrote: “I’m on the site but it’s not clear what http://ai.com offers!”
On Meta’s Threads, user hridoyreh posted: “Why and for what exactly do I need to add a card for my AI.com username? Is this how they want to recover the $70 million they spent?” To which one user replied: “Ran into that this morning and was a big NOPE from me.” And another commented: “Literally no idea what that website / product does.”
Marszalek reportedly bought the domain for $70 million, which is estimated to be “the single largest domain purchase in history,” according to the company, as reported by the Financial Times.
According to AI.com’s release, the company’s “key differentiating feature is the agent’s ability to autonomously build out missing features and capabilities to complete real-world tasks. … Such improvements will subsequently be shared across millions of agents on the network, massively increasing the utility of each agent for ai.com users.”
It also said users will soon be able to deploy their agent to do a range of actions, like trading stocks, automating workflows, organizing and executing daily tasks with their calendar, or even updating their online dating profile—all while remaining private, permission-based, and fully under the user’s control.