AI.com's $85 million Super Bowl ad campaign falls foul as traffic crashes servers — the campaign allegedly cost $15 million for the ads, $70 million for 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 bought its way onto the biggest advertising stage in the world on Sunday night, running a fourth-quarter Super Bowl ad spot that told tens of millions of sports fans worldwide to head to the site and create a handle. Hyped-up viewers arrived in droves, and then the site crashed.

Within minutes of the ad airing, users across social platforms reported that AI.com was either unreachable or stuck in failed sign-up loops, turning what was meant to be the site’s big launch moment into an unexpected stress test that failed right before the eyes of millions. The company soon restored its service, but first impressions count.

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That excuse might sound like your typical tech bro attempt to pass the buck to somebody else, but there’s some plausibility to his claim given how AI.com’s onboarding works. At launch, the site funnels new users through a single “continue with Google” authentication option. Once millions of users suddenly arrived and began attempting to create their AI agents, Google may have begun throttling requests, effectively making the site unusable.

For a company that reportedly spent $70 million to secure the AI.com domain — a level of investment that suggests it’s a business that wants to establish itself as a foundational platform — it’s arguably inexcusable for its first mass-market test to expose a launch stack that had zero redundancy or meaningful margin for error. When the single point of failure gave way in the form of throttled Google authentication requests, it was lights out.

AI.com is selling itself as a way to create personal AI agents that can execute tasks across apps and operate with verifying levels of access depending on subscription tier. That’s an ambitious promise, and that ultimately falls flat when the company behind it can’t even get the basics like user authentication squared away right out of the gate.

According to Adweek, AI accounted for 23% of ads shown during this year’s Super Bowl — a grim statistic for those of us who are fed up with the force-feeding.

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Luke James
Luke James
Contributor

Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist.  Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory. 

5 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
  • thesyndrome
    Is anyone getting dotcom-crash flashbacks? I read that they bought AI.com for $70 million without actually explaining what to do on AI.com, and all I could think of was Pets.com....
    Reply