IT之家 October 8 news: On October 7 local time, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) released the applications for its new round of top-level domains (TLDs). This round (April 30 to August 12, 2026) received a total of 1615 applications from 481 applicants, with AI-related domains becoming a major hotspot.
IT之家 note: The last time ICANN opened applications for new gTLDs was in 2012, and the previous round of the New gTLD Program ultimately introduced more than 1200 new top-level domains.
Calculated by the applicants' regions, this round had 198 applicants from North America, 156 from the Asia-Pacific region, 111 from Europe, 9 from Latin America and the Caribbean, and 7 from Africa.
Among AI-related domains, .agent received 10 applications, with applicants including Meta and OpenAI; .agi drew 7 company applicants, with OpenAI among them; and .asi received 6 company applications, with OpenAI also participating.
In addition, 4 companies applied for .intelligence, while Meta jointly applied for the extra-long .superintelligence with another company. OpenAI applied for 15 top-level domains in total this time, while Meta submitted 21 applications.
The domains applied for in this round can roughly be divided into two categories. One is generic domains for broad use by users and businesses, such as .geek, .haha, .anime and .jackpot. There are also some rather special applications, including "itiswhatitis".
The other category is brand-exclusive domains for enterprises. This round saw a total of 345 brand-related applications, involving .applebees, .bankofamerica, .zillow and .zoom, among others.
For example, Meta applied for domains such as .facebook, .instagram, .messenger, .meta, .frommeta and .threads; Bluesky applied for .bsky; OpenAI applied for domains such as .chatgpt, .codex, .openai and .gpt; Anthropic applied for .anthropic and .claude.
These brand top-level domains can in the future be used for corporate official websites, product pages, social media usernames and other scenarios. For example, companies can use exclusive top-level domains to build more recognizable web addresses.
Over the past few years, some domains have gained a degree of prominence due to specific technology trends, such as .ai and .app, but most users are still more accustomed to traditional suffixes like .com. The large number of brand-exclusive top-level domain applications from tech companies this time also shows that these companies' attention to the domain name system is increasing. Previously, not many companies were able to own and use their own top-level domains over the long term, with Google and a few others being early examples.
It should be noted that submitting an application is only one step in the process of creating a new top-level domain and does not mean these domains have been approved. ICANN said that applications in this round will not enter the formal approval stage any earlier than next year. IT之家 will continue to follow up.
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