ICANN reveals 1,615 new domain applications, and AI suffixes like .agent and .agi are crowded

The internet is getting new endings. ICANN has revealed 1,615 applications for new top-level domains, and a surprising share of them read like an AI startup’s pitch deck. Ten companies, including Meta and OpenAI, applied for .agent, according to The Verge. OpenAI also applied for .agi, which drew seven applicants, and .asi, which drew six. A top-level domain is the part of a web address after the final dot. Think .com, .org, or, for the culinary-minded, .pizza. Owning one means you run the registry for every name that ends in it, a bit like owning the street rather than just a house on it. What landed on ICANN’s desk The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers published the full list on October 7, 2026, a milestone it calls Reveal Day. The application window ran from April 30 to August 12, 2026. The 1,615 applications came from 481 different applicants. Of the total, 333 are brand applications and 16 are community-based applications. Applying is not cheap. ICANN charges USD 227,000 per string, so the ten applicants for .agent each wrote a check of that size for a shot at a single suffix. Some players went wide rather than deep. Link Freedom Group submitted hundreds of a...