The $70 Million Website That Doesn't Work: Inside AI.com's Super Bowl Disaster

The most expensive domain name in history crashed on the one night it needed to work.

AI.com aired a 30-second spot during the fourth quarter of Super Bowl LX on 8 February, telling millions of viewers to 'claim your handle'. What they got was an error page. No product. No sign-up. Just a broken link backed by $78 million (£57 million) in spending.

The Ad That Won the Night but Lost the Room

Credit where it's due: the ad worked as advertising. Analytics firm EDO ranked AI.com as the top-performing commercial of the entire Super Bowl, generating 9.1 times more engagement than the median spot. It beat ads from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and every other brand across every category.

The ad was deliberately vague. It showed three usernames, Mark, Sam, and Elon, without explaining what AI.com actually does. No product demo. No feature list. Just intrigue. And it worked too well. The resulting traffic took down the site immediately.

Kris Marszalek, the company's founder and chief executive of Crypto.com, responded on X: 'Insane traffic levels. We prepared for scale, but not for THIS.'

A company that claims to be building 'infrastructure for AGI' couldn't keep a website running during a traffic spike it paid $8 million (£5.8 million) to create.

What's Actually Under the Bonnet

Here's where it gets worse. Marszalek himself, in a post on his personal X account, described AI.com as 'the world's first easy-to-use and secure implementation of OpenClaw, the open-source agent framework that went viral two weeks ago.'

OpenClaw is free. It's open-source software built by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, with over 145,000 GitHub stars. Anyone with technical know-how can download it and set it up in a few hours.

So what does AI.com actually add?

According to an independent review by AI Tool Discovery, the platform is an OpenClaw wrapper with managed hosting that cuts setup time from several hours down to about 60 seconds. It also adds security and a curated skill marketplace. That's the value proposition behind the most expensive domain ever purchased. The same core technology is available for free through OpenClaw itself or through a competing platform called Emergent for businesses.

Same Founder, Same Script

Marszalek isn't new to this. The Financial Times reported he paid $70 million (£51.2 million) for the AI.com domain in April 2025. He previously spent $12 million (£8.8 million) to acquire Crypto.com in 2018.

In February 2022, Crypto.com ran its own Super Bowl ad. Matt Damon told America that 'fortune favours the brave.' Within months, Bitcoin fell from around $43,000 (£31,400) to as low as $17,700 (£12,900) by June 2022. Crypto.com started cutting staff. The 2022 Super Bowl became known as the 'Crypto Bowl', and not for good reasons.

Now look at 2026. Bitcoin peaked above $126,000 (£92,000) in early October 2025 and has since fallen to around $69,000 (£50,400), more than 45% in just four months. Analysts at Bitwise have called this a 'full-bore, 2022-like crypto winter.'

And in the middle of it, Marszalek has once again bought a record-priced domain and aired a Super Bowl ad.

What This Means if You're Thinking of Signing Up

According to iSpot data, 23% of Super Bowl LX advertisers promoted AI products. There were more AI ads (seven) than traditional beer and car commercials combined, EDO reported. The AI gold rush is real.

But attention and substance aren't the same.

If AI.com's own founder says the platform runs on free technology, consumers should ask what exactly they're paying for. A domain name and a Super Bowl ad aren't a product.

The most expensive domain name in history crashed on the one night it needed to work. And the technology behind it was free all along.