ICANN published the applicant list for its 2026 new generic top-level domain (gTLD) round on October 7, U.S. time: 481 applicants filed 1,615 valid applications in total, across every category of new suffix ICANN is accepting this cycle. It's the first time ICANN has reopened new suffixes for application since the 2012 round, and the list offers the clearest look yet at which companies are staking claims on internet real estate tied to artificial intelligence.
The list shows the fiercest competition clustered around a handful of AI-related generic words rather than company brand names. .agent received 13 applications, making it the single most contested string in this entire round. .agi drew 7 applications and .asi drew 5. A notch below that cluster, .bit received 11 applications, while .api, .brand and .hub each drew 10 — all of them trailing .agent in applicant count.
Who's applying
OpenAI, filing under the corporate name OPENAI OPCO, LLC, submitted 15 primary applications in total. Some are for its own branded terms — .openai, .chatgpt, .codex, .gpt — while the rest target broader generic terms that aren't tied to any single product: .agent, .agi, .asi, .mcp, .model, .voice. .mcp refers to the Model Context Protocol, the interoperability standard that Anthropic originally spearheaded; OpenAI evidently wants that suffix sitting inside its own registry as well.
Meta, operating through its subsidiary Meta Registry Holdings, has 18 primary applications and 21 entries once secondary filings are counted. Beyond its usual brand terms, the company applied for .llama, .metaai, .aiglasses, and, notably, .superintelligence — a fitting match, since Meta's internal AI division is formally named Superintelligence Labs.
Google's domain-registry arm, Charleston Road Registry, filed for 39 strings in total, the highest count of any AI-focused company in this round. That list includes .gemini and .deepmind for its own products, and the company also went after shared generic terms such as .agent, .api and .intelligence. Anthropic, by contrast, was the most restrained of the major AI labs, applying only for .anthropic and .claude.
Domain registrars are in the mix too, not just the AI companies themselves. Radix shows up on the applicant lists for .agent, .agi and .asi alike, while Link Freedom Group applied for both .agi and .asi.
What happens after a string is contested
When multiple applicants want the exact same string, ICANN has barred any private deal-making between those applicants for this round, a change from how some disputes were resolved in 2012. That leaves three paths forward: switch to a backup string filed as an alternative, withdraw the application altogether, or proceed to an ICANN-run auction. The window to swap to a backup string runs from October 8 to 21; string confirmation day, when the final list of contested strings locks in, is set for November 17. After that the process moves into public comment and formal objection periods, followed by substantive evaluation and, eventually, delegation of the suffix to its winner. Going by the industry's typical 18-to-24-month timeline for this kind of review, most of this round's new suffixes likely won't open for public registration until 2027 at the earliest.
Applying in the first place isn't cheap, either. ICANN's published evaluation fee is $227,000 per application, with a community priority evaluation — for applicants arguing a string serves a defined community — costing up to another $80,000 on top of that. For OpenAI's 15 primary applications alone, evaluation fees run to roughly $3.4 million by a rough estimate, and that's before any auction costs are added in.
What the 2012 round showed
In the 2012 round, ICANN received about 1,930 applications, each carrying an evaluation fee of $185,000. The most famous auction to come out of that round was for .app, which Google won in 2015 for roughly $25 million and later turned into a developer-facing suffix that mandates HTTPS by default. That same round also left behind plenty of generic suffixes that drew fierce competition at the application stage but then sold tepidly once registration actually opened to the public — a reminder that heavy bidding up front doesn't guarantee strong registration uptake down the line.
Measured against the .app precedent, .agent's 13 competitors include three cash-rich players — OpenAI, Meta and Google — so if the contest for that string does reach an ICANN auction, the winning price is unlikely to come in low. How long "agent" stays a hot enough word to justify that price is something even the applicants themselves can't say for sure. ICANN's list only shows who applied for what; none of the companies has disclosed what it actually plans to do with .agent, or whether it intends to open the suffix to public registration at all once it's secured.
Chinese companies have a notably thin presence in this round. The only Chinese applicant named so far in public reporting is World Data Organization, a group headquartered in China that applied for .wdo and remains in ICANN's administrative review stage.
Sources: ICANN New gTLD Program applicant disclosure, CircleID, The Verge, CocoLoop; fee figures and the string-change/confirmation-date schedule verified against ICANN's Applicant Guidebook.