The Seattle Seahawks may have dominated the Super Bowl. But when it comes to the event’s famed advertisements, A.I. was the real winner. A.I. appeared across nearly one-quarter of this year’s Super Bowl ads, including spots in which Anthropic pledged an ad-free version of Claude, Meta showed off its smart glasses, and Salesforce tapped MrBeast to promote its A.I. agent. The most direct reference to A.I., however, belonged to an ad from AI.com, a newly launched venture from Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek.
As a platform offering personal agents, AI.com is a relatively late newcomer to the world of autonomous A.I. But Marszalek is confident that his company will eventually enable the mainstream adoption of agents—and he’s not afraid of finding bold ways to broadcast his vision. Besides paying millions of dollars for a 30-second Super Bowl spot that urged viewers to sign up for the platform, the Polish entrepreneur shelled out a record $70 million last year to acquire the domain name.
AI.com, which officially launched yesterday, allows users to deploy agents for a range of tasks, such as trading stocks, automating workflows, and updating online dating profiles. The service is free to use—with additional paid subscription tiers—and is eyeing integrations within financial services and both human and agent-populated social networks for its future. “Our vision is a decentralized network of billions of agents who self-improve and share these improvements with each other, vastly and rapidly expanding agentic capabilities and accelerating the advent of AGI,” said Marszalek in a statement.
Shelling out millions for a domain name
The Polish entrepreneur is putting his money where his mouth is. Last April, Marszalek paid tens of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency to acquire the domain name AI.com, which was formerly owned by Malaysian entrepreneur Arsyan Ismail. The deal was brokered by Larry Fischer, director of GetYourDomain.com.
“In deciding to sell, the prior owner sought a buyer whose vision he believed in—someone capable of building a lasting legacy around one of the most important digital assets of this era,” Fischer told Observer in a statement. “He found that buyer in Kris, even turning down substantially higher offers.”
This isn’t the first time Marszalek has embarked on an aggressive marketing campaign. He used similar tactics to spur Crypto.com, the cryptocurrency exchange he helped launch in 2016, to success. The venture has tapped stars like Matt Damon for celebrity partnerships and even paid $700 million to rename the Staples Center in Los Angeles as the Crypto.com Arena.
Marszalek, who now heads both Crypto.com and AI.com, appears confident his newest venture will succeed in mainstreaming A.I. agents in a manner reminiscent of the push toward cryptocurrency adoption. “When we started Crypto.com, there were around a thousand different exchanges, and we somehow managed to make it work,” he told the Financial Times. “We will make this [AI.com] work one way or another.”
The A.I. platform is already making history. Marszalek’s acquisition of AI.com stands as the most expensive domain name ever publicly disclosed, more than doubling the previous record set by Voice.com, which sold for $30 million in 2019.
The niche business of domain name trading has experienced an unexpected boom amid the A.I. revolution. OpenAI spent an undisclosed amount of money on Chat.com, a domain that had previously sold for $15.5 million, while A.I. companionship startup Friend handed over $1.8 million for friend.com. And in Anguilla, a British territory that controls the “.ai” internet domain, new domain name registrations netted the island nearly $40 million in profit in 2024 alone.
