AI.com’s $85 million Super Bowl ad campaign backfires as traffic overwhelms servers—the campaign reportedly spent $15 million on the ads and $70 million on the domain name

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Firm's CEO insists he had 'prepared for scale, but not for THIS.'

AI.com landing page
(Image credit: Future)

AI.com secured its place on the world’s largest advertising platform Sunday night, airing a fourth-quarter Super Bowl commercial urging tens of millions of global sports fans to visit the site and build a Handle. Excited viewers showed up in large numbers, and then the site crashed.

Within minutes of the ad airing, users across social platforms reported that AI.com was either inaccessible or trapped in failed sign-up cycles, transforming what was intended as the site’s major launch moment into an unexpected Stress test that collapsed right before the eyes of millions. The company quickly brought its service back, but first impressions matter.

That excuse may seem like your standard tech bro move to shift blame onto someone else, but his assertion carries some weight considering how AI.com’s onboarding functions. At launch, the site directs new users to a single “continue with Google” authentication method. Once millions of users suddenly showed up and started trying to build their AI agents, Google may have started limiting requests, rendering the site effectively unusable.

For a company that reportedly poured $70 million into acquiring the AI.com domain—a commitment indicating it aims to position itself as a core platform—it’s hard to justify Its initial mass-market trial to reveal a launch system with no redundancy or any meaningful buffer for mistakes. When the single point of failure collapsed due to throttled Google authentication requests, it was all over.

AI.com is positioning itself as a solution for building personal AI agents capable of performing tasks across applications and functioning with varying access levels based on subscription tier. That’s a bold claim, and it ultimately rings hollow when the company behind it can’t even nail basic functions like user authentication from the start.

According to Adweek, AI generated 23% of the ads aired during this year’s Super Bowl — a sobering figure for those of us who are fed up with the force-feeding.

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Luke James
Luke James
Contributor
4 Comments Comment from the forums
  • bigdragon
    The AI advertising was absolutely over the top Sunday evening. My personal favorite was the commercial where the office workers used AI so that they could have it work while they took a day off. There should have been a follow-up commercial where all the employees were fired for time fraud, AI was fully entrusted to operate the business without human oversight, and then the business shut down due to fleeing customers. I'm convinced the movie Idiocracy was a message from the future and not some parody or comedy entertainment.
    Reply
  • DS426
    bigdragon said:
    The AI advertising was absolutely over the top Sunday evening. My personal favorite was the commercial where the office workers used AI so that they could have it work while they took a day off. There should have been a follow-up commercial where all the employees were fired for time fraud, AI was fully entrusted to operate the business without human oversight, and then the business shut down due to fleeing customers. I'm convinced the movie Idiocracy was a message from the future and not some parody or comedy entertainment.
    I've been thinking about Idiocracy a lot lately...

    As for the Super Bowl, didn't watch it. I'm not into sports at all. I'm happy that I didn't get clobbered by all the AI buzz.

    Just as society was kind of starting to get a handle on ransomware, this next wave of compromise is going to be worse as individuals all over expose their account credentials and by extension private and sensitive info -- including banking and financial info -- by over-trusting and over-relying on agentic AI. All the providers will say it's safe and secure, but talk is cheap. So friends, I implore you to sit tight and allow the security community to vet the safe(r) ones from the rest of the cesspool if you have any interest in this sort of thing.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    I'm glad this article at least explained the point of AI.com. As I recall, the commercial just said something like "AGI is almost upon us. Prepare by securing your handle at Ai.com." And then proceeded to tell you absolutely nothing about what you could do with an AI.com account.

    Bigdragon said:
    My personal favorite was the commercial where the office workers used AI so that they could have it work while they took a day off. There should have been a follow-up commercial where all the employees were fired for time fraud, AI was fully entrusted to operate the business without human oversight, and then the business shut down due to fleeing customers.
    I had almost the same thought, except my version was that the boss sees how little everyone now has to work and just gets rid of all but a couple of them.

    And then I was thinking they'd better hope the slop they got from AI is actually right.
    Reply
  • bigdragon
    bit_user said:
    I'm glad this article at least explained the point of AI.com. As I recall, the commercial just said something like "AGI is almost upon us. Prepare by securing your handle at Ai.com." And then proceeded to tell you absolutely nothing about what you could do with an AI.com account.
    YES, THIS! ^ That whole commercial was "do you know who I know?" Name-dropping nonsense. That's the sort of talk I expect from someone faking it in the hopes that one day they'll make it.

    The overload of AI-related advertising and lesser-known names looking to rise to prominence reminded me of the dot-com days -- something that's hard for me to forget given that my local stadium was originally known as PSINet Stadium.
    Reply