.ai domain guide: registry, rules and eligibility

The Government of Anguilla still holds the ccTLD manager title with IANA and remains the sponsoring authority behind .ai, exactly as recorded in the IANA delegation entry. But the actual registry work, the day-to-day running of the thing, has sat with Identity Digital since January 2025. That's a registry services company based in Bellevue, Washington, and it took over after .ai was migrated off the Anguillan government's own infrastructure and onto Identity Digital's platform. Identity Digital Inc. is the corporate entity behind that operation.

Strip away the jargon and the roles split cleanly. The registry is Identity Digital: it holds the master database, runs the nic.ai registration site plus the whois.nic.ai server, and sets the operational rules, including the two-year minimum registration term. Registrars are the retail layer, over 160 of them by Identity Digital's own count, ranging from big names like GoDaddy to smaller specialist resellers. They're the ones selling names to actual customers and handling billing, DNS and support tickets. The registrant is simply whoever's name and contact details sit on the registration, the person or organisation that actually owns it. Anguilla's government doesn't touch registration policy beyond sponsoring the delegation itself; that's all Identity Digital, and it's Identity Digital's rules that registrants and registrars deal with in practice.

.ai has no gatekeeping. Anyone, anywhere can register one: you don't need to live in Anguilla, hold Anguillan citizenship, or run anything remotely connected to artificial intelligence. That's confirmed by both GoDaddy's registrar documentation and Identity Digital's own backend policy.

The one rule the registry actually enforces has nothing to do with who you are. It's about term length: registrations and renewals must be made in blocks of at least two years, up to a maximum of ten, per registrar-published .ai policy pages. WHOIS runs on a thick model too, so registrant, administrative and technical contact details get collected and published for every .ai domain rather than sitting privately with the registrar. Registrar documentation lists internationalised domain names as unsupported for .ai.

Past those registry-level rules, it comes down to whoever you buy from. Registrars differ on pricing, renewal reminders, privacy add-ons, and how clearly (or not) they flag that mandatory two-year commitment at checkout. None of them, though, can waive the registry's own term-length or contact-data requirements.

Transferring a .ai domain means getting an authorisation code from the losing registrar, same mechanism used across most gTLDs and plenty of ccTLDs. Once the gaining registrar processes that code, the domain's term gets extended by two years as part of the move. Both Enom and QuickHost confirm this.

Registration and renewal run in two-year blocks only, up to a ten-year cap. A one-year term simply isn't on offer, at any stage. Some registrars sell registry lock as an add-on running on Identity Digital's platform. This blocks unauthorised transfers and record changes at the registry level, which is a different thing entirely from the ordinary registrar-side lock most providers switch on by default.

What we couldn't find published anywhere for this guide is a fixed grace period or redemption fee schedule specific to .ai. General ccTLD and gTLD practice gives you a renewal grace period, then a pricier redemption window before a lapsed name gets released for good. One registrar, Spaceship, lists a .ai redemption fee of $165.60, but that's just one seller's retail price, not a confirmed registry-wide charge. Check your own registrar's expiry terms directly. Don't assume a standard timeline exists here, because as far as we can tell, it doesn't.