The tiny Caribbean nation of Anguilla has found a lucrative side-gig in the business of letting artificial intelligence companies use its .ai domain code for their websites.
Haydn Hughes, Anguilla’s minister of tourism and infrastructure, told Fox Business that it was “totally incidental” that the country was“At that time, we didn’t have computers in Anguilla, we didn’t have any modern technology in Anguilla in 1995, and so we didn’t have email addresses, we didn’t have internet. So, artificial intelligence was something that was far removed from our cerebral cortex,” Hughes explained.
There were about 100,000 registered .ai domains in 2021, which quickly rose to 354,000 by 2023 after the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other popular AI programs. On an island of just about 15,000 people, the minister said this money goes a long way. Part of the increased income has gone to a senior healthcare program, as well as into the country’s public school system.