10% of Anguilla's GDP is .ai domain fees (2023) (arstechnica.com)

The domain fees now exceed $30M/year and population is under 16K, so call it $2K/year per capita.

Assuming average family size of 3.5, it's $7K/year per family.

That's real money, in exchange for doing nothing.

Anguilla has the top-level domain ".ai" by luck!

Hot take but I think the .ai tld will become out of style, and even a turnoff in a few years. Especially if a lot of AI tools end up falling short of expectations, and make embarrassing mistakes. Users will be grow tired of hearing something is using AI

I'm kind of surprised that it is so significant, though I don't know the scale.. I went to Anguilla ~25yrs ago in a small sailing boat, lovely place and lovely people but as I understood it they were mainly into offshore banking, which should really dwarf domain registrations. Perhaps offshore banking has been cleaned up? I don't think they are big on tourism, they preferred to have fewer high cost hotels than lots of people visiting..

If domain fees counted as "exports," they would be Anguilla's main export. In fact, that reclassification would nearly quadruple their exports.

Cute TLDs as part of a company's brand always make me wonder ... is it just brand or is there any meat here?

It might not be a fair thing to think but I can't help but think of that.

(2023)

More recently lots of discussion:

.ai website registrations are a windfall for tiny Anguilla

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39194477

This sort of news reminds me of that scene in The Big Short.

For example: - https://www.mozilla.ai/ - https://sdk.vercel.ai/ - https://x.ai/