ICANN published the applicant list for its new generic top-level domain round on October 7, 2026, drawing 1,615 applications, with .agent and .agi among the strings filed. It is the first expansion of the internet's naming space since 2012, ending a 14-year freeze and giving AI companies a chance to carry their technic
The application window closed earlier in 2026, and ICANN's tally of 1,615 submissions sits about 16 percent below the 1,930 filed in 2012. The list includes .agent, aimed at the fast-commercializing AI agent market, and .agi, short for artificial general intelligence. The Verge described the pair on October 7 as the hot new domains. The base application fee rose to $227,000 from $185,000 in 2012, while ICANN's Applicant Support Program cuts the fee by roughly 75 percent, to $22,700, for qualifying applicants from underserved regions. Applicants also pay a $10,000 registry evaluation deposit and must accept rights-protection mechanisms including the Trademark Clearinghouse
The last gTLD expansion, in 2012, drew 1,930 applications and delegated roughly 1,200 suffixes, among them .app, .dev and .shop. ICANN then spent nearly a decade on the Subsequent Procedures debate, covering closed generic strings, the reach of Governmental Advisory Committee objections and criticism that auctions simply reward the deepest pockets, and the round stayed frozen. AI broke the deadlock. .ai is Anguilla's country code, but AI companies adopted it wholesale after 2022; registrations climbed from the low hundreds of thousands to roughly 350,000
Liu Gong argues that the real story in this round is not the number 1,615 but the shift of suffixes from brand assets into technical labels.
From a technical standpoint, the domain name system remains one of the few highly centralized pieces of internet infrastructure. Every new suffix requires a root zone change, DNSSEC trust chain configuration and compatibility testing across global resolvers. The risk with .agent is that it is a generic term rather than a trademark, so anyone can claim it, a very different path from .app, which Google alone operated after 2012. Should several parties apply, resolution could take years. The more immediate problem is security: when AI agents address one another by domain, a single squatted .agent suffix is enough to break the trust assumptions of an entire call chain.
On the business side, this is a cash-flow game. At a base fee of $227,000, 1,615 applications generate close to $370 million before any evaluation work begins, and registries earn their real money on renewals, with .com renewal rates holding above 70 percent for years. Measured against .ai, at roughly 350,000 registrations and a street price near $70 each, a successful AI suffix could produce tens of millions of dollars a year. The counterexamples are just as instructive: many of the 1,200 suffixes delegated after 2012 never passed 10,000 registrations, and their operators let them lapse.
For the industry, the deeper question is who owns the names. AI companies have lived under .ai, .com or their own subdomains, with the suffix defined by someone else. If one company wins .agent and runs it as a closed registry, it carves a private estate out of a public naming space, which sits awkwardly with ICANN's stated openness. Liu Gong expects the identity of the .agent applicant, and whether it operates openly, to become ICANN's next governance fight within 12 months, following the closed generic dispute.
- Applications: 1,615 this round versus 1,930 in 2012, a decline of about 16 percent
- Fees: base application fee of $227,000, up from $185,000 in 2012, a 22.7 percent increase
- .ai benchmark: roughly 350,000 registrations and about $32 million in 2023 revenue for Anguilla, against about 160 million .com registrations
- Attrition: of 1,930 applications in 2012, only about 1,200 suffixes were ultimately delegated, a near-40 percent washout
- Cash: at the base fee, application revenue alone comes to roughly $366 million
- Fee relief: the Applicant Support
For the industry, nothing registrable appears within three months. Once the list is published, applications face objections, evaluation and contention resolution, so first delegations are unlikely before 2027. Registries and trademark service providers are the near-term winners, and .ai registrations will not fall immediately. Over a year, if .agent runs as an open registry, AI startups gain a semantically clean suffix that can double as an agent addressing scheme, potentially merging domain names and API endpoints into one naming layer; if a single gian
Questions worth exploring:
- The .agent fight: should a generic-term suffix be allowed to operate as a closed registry?
- .ai's replacement or coexistence: how durable is Anguilla's country-code model?
- Domains as an AI identity layer: agent addressing meets DNS
This item comes from The Verge AI (published 2026-10-07 18:46:16). Wenfeng Radar provides a Chinese/English summary and commentary on overseas AI developments; the original content is owned by its author.
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