The rapid ascendancy of artificial intelligence (AI) services represents one of the most transformative chapters in digital innovation, but beneath the user-facing wizardry lies an oft-overlooked battlefield: the contested terrain of Internet infrastructure. As chatbots, generative tools, and AI agents infiltrate our desktops and devices, their ultimate reliability, resilience, and growth will be just as much a product of domain name registration, IP address allocations, and network architecture decisions as algorithmic brilliance or hardware muscle. What emerges from a close, technical scrutiny of domain and IP strategies among top AI providers is a story not just of engineering, but of corporate philosophy, brand calculus, and evolving notions of digital sovereignty.
At first glance, domain names might seem like a relic from the dial-up era, eclipsed by seamless mobile app launches and voice-activated assistants. Yet, the infrastructure choices made by AI leaders reveal domains remain critical levers of visibility, trust, and traffic control. A recent survey of five frontline AI providers—OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, DeepSeek, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Anthropic’s Claude—uncovers a striking bifurcation in domain strategy, tightly aligned with corporate lineage and marketing vision.
This strategy maximizes autonomy in brand storytelling and user acquisition. The uninhibited use of product names for main entry points reinforces strong recall and, over time, turns domains into verb-like shorthands (“Google it”, “ChatGPT this”). However, there are downstream implications: taking on the full burden of traffic management, network optimization, and infrastructure scaling—all of which grow exponentially as AI solutions move from novelty to universal utility.
This subdomain approach has two main benefits. First, it leverages legacy trust signals—users landing on a “microsoft.com” or “google.com” property are reassured by brand authority and security. Second, it facilitates flexible repositioning: AI features can be surfaced, bundled, or migrated as business strategy dictates, without needing the heavy lift of launching, maintaining, and defending a distinct global brand.
Of course, downsides exist. Subdomains are inherently less memorable than top-level, product-driven domains, and (as seen with Google’s Gemini) issues may arise when the most desirable generic domain (“gemini.com”) is in use by an unrelated firm, diluting branding opportunities.
Owning an ASN and directly managing address blocks allows Anthropic to:
As AI services proliferate, the politics and practices of Internet governance will shape who gains or loses autonomy in global service provision. If, for example, future international agreements or technical standards make ASN or IP allocation more stringent, or embed stricter rules for data residency and sovereignty, then startups without early investments in their own infrastructure may find themselves blocked from critical markets or forced into expensive back-foot negotiations with upstream providers.
Competition among Chinese AI startups like DeepSeek and their homegrown Internet titans (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) is not just a matter of algorithmic prowess or interface polish, but increasingly, one of who controls more of the physical and logical fabric of the Internet. Outsourcing control to foreign infrastructure suppliers, while offering a fast path to market, could become a strategic liability under tightening international and domestic regulation.
There is also a danger of further concentrating Internet “chokepoints” and power among a handful of entities. As AI services become mission critical, dependency on a tiny handful of networks—whether giant cloud providers, global CDNs, or a limited pool of root-level ASNs—may undermine resilience and stifle market diversity.
A further risk is the potential for regulatory overreach or fragmentation. As governments become ever more attuned to the strategic value of AI, there’s growing movement toward “digital sovereignty”—calls for mandatory data localization, network control, and compliance with national network policies. This could, paradoxically, force companies to spin up isolated, less optimal infrastructure just to meet divergent local rules, thereby driving up costs and snarling deployment timelines.
For AI-centric startups, the challenges are formidable: speed to market must be balanced with an urgent race to acquire infrastructure autonomy. For entrenched Internet behemoths, the challenge is to integrate new AI capabilities without eroding the value of a century’s worth of catchment and trust, while remaining agile enough to unbundle offerings should market or regulatory winds shift.
Underneath every AI-powered interaction—every helpful suggestion, half-finished email, or generative leap—runs the hum of packets, DNS lookups, and BGP tables. The companies that grasp this full-stack reality, and invest in the hard, unglamorous work of Internet infrastructure mastery, will own not just the future of AI, but the very roads on which digital civilization travels.
Source: CircleID An Internet Infrastructure Perspective on AI Service Provision
Domain Names and the Architecture of AI Branding
At first glance, domain names might seem like a relic from the dial-up era, eclipsed by seamless mobile app launches and voice-activated assistants. Yet, the infrastructure choices made by AI leaders reveal domains remain critical levers of visibility, trust, and traffic control. A recent survey of five frontline AI providers—OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, DeepSeek, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Anthropic’s Claude—uncovers a striking bifurcation in domain strategy, tightly aligned with corporate lineage and marketing vision.The “Pure AI Startup” Approach: Building Destinations
Startups like OpenAI (chatgpt.com), DeepSeek (deepseek.com), and Anthropic (claude.com) have all registered standalone, product-branded domains. The rationale is clear: in an attention economy where first-mover advantage can quickly ossify into habit and preference, making the AI service itself the “destination” positions these offerings as core products—not mere features. This is vital for startups striving to create entire ecosystems and “brands” defined by, and indistinguishable from, their AI tool.This strategy maximizes autonomy in brand storytelling and user acquisition. The uninhibited use of product names for main entry points reinforces strong recall and, over time, turns domains into verb-like shorthands (“Google it”, “ChatGPT this”). However, there are downstream implications: taking on the full burden of traffic management, network optimization, and infrastructure scaling—all of which grow exponentially as AI solutions move from novelty to universal utility.
The “Internet Incumbent” Model: Integration Over Independence
By contrast, Google and Microsoft fold their AI services—Gemini and Copilot—under existing flagship domains (gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com). For the legacy giants, the calculus is different. Their overriding advantage lies in colossal, embedded user bases, multi-decade investments in proprietary infrastructure, and vast portfolios of interconnected services. Deploying AI as a subdomain allows seamless cross-integration: Copilot can weave into Office, Bing, and Windows; Gemini adds capabilities to Gmail, Docs, and Search.This subdomain approach has two main benefits. First, it leverages legacy trust signals—users landing on a “microsoft.com” or “google.com” property are reassured by brand authority and security. Second, it facilitates flexible repositioning: AI features can be surfaced, bundled, or migrated as business strategy dictates, without needing the heavy lift of launching, maintaining, and defending a distinct global brand.
Of course, downsides exist. Subdomains are inherently less memorable than top-level, product-driven domains, and (as seen with Google’s Gemini) issues may arise when the most desirable generic domain (“gemini.com”) is in use by an unrelated firm, diluting branding opportunities.
IP Address Strategies: The Bedrock of Autonomy
Beyond the digital window-dressing of domains, ultimate control over service quality, resilience, and global reach depends on how an AI provider manages its IP address blocks and routing capabilities. Here again, the landscape divides sharply.Incumbent Fortresses: The Power of Proprietary Networks
Google (Gemini) and Microsoft (Copilot) are architectural behemoths, operating on decades-old, deeply entrenched proprietary IP networks, under their own Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs: AS15169 for Google, AS8075 for Microsoft). This affords immense strategic advantages:- End-to-End Optimization: They can determine optimal routes for traffic, adapt in real time to congestion, and guarantee low latency and high throughput across continents.
- Service Quality Control: By bypassing third-party ISPs at critical points, they retain far more consistent control over user experience, even during network anomalies.
- Security and Compliance: Proprietary routing and isolation mitigate the risk of BGP hijacks, DDoS amplification, or interception by malicious actors—vital as AI services handle sensitive queries and outputs.
- Economies of Scale: Investments in peering, fiber, and edge caching flow directly into AI service delivery, yielding cost efficiencies and absorption of massive workload spikes.
Startup Dependencies: Relying (and Risking) on Third Parties
OpenAI (chatgpt.com) and DeepSeek (deepseek.com), in contrast, are still tethered to third-party ISPs for external-facing IP address allocations (e.g., ChatGPT via AS22612, associated with Namecheap; DeepSeek via AS13335, Cloudflare). This dependence introduces notable limitations:- Routing Constraints: Lacking their own ASN or IP allocations means having to defer to the third-party provider’s traffic engineering—potentially suboptimal, especially under high load, regional outages, or when regulatory policies shift.
- Limited Flexibility: Latency- and throughput-sensitive routing adjustments become more cumbersome, with more negotiation and slower response times to emergent needs or threats.
- Growth Bottlenecks: As user volume and AI inference demands soar, scaling via rented infrastructure is both costlier and riskier; abrupt rate changes or service terms from upstream providers can suddenly impede rollouts or degrade quality.
- Brand and Security Perception: Savvier enterprise clients—and eventually end users—may notice these dependencies, particularly as geopolitical and regulatory scrutiny of AI providers intensifies.
Anthropic’s Notable Step Forward
Anthropic, with its Claude AI (claude.com), stands as an outlier among startups by securing its own IP infrastructure (ASN: AS399358). This move signals not just a technical upgrade, but a long-term maturation toward genuine Internet sovereignty—a prerequisite, many experts believe, to matching the scale, robustness, and assurance provided by the likes of Google and Microsoft.Owning an ASN and directly managing address blocks allows Anthropic to:
- Exercise full traffic engineering for global optimization.
- Mitigate latency and packet loss with greater agility, particularly vital for AI workloads sensitive to real-time inputs and outputs.
- Build trust with partners, who may require assurances around compliance, privacy, and data residency inaccessible via third-party hosts alone.
The Technical-Strategic Feedback Loop
What these divergent infrastructure choices ultimately reflect is a profound interplay between technical design and business positioning.For AI Startups
- Flexibility versus Control: While startups need rapid go-to-market strategies, and third-party clouds, CDNs, and ISPs enable fast deployment, this agility gradually transforms into risk as user numbers swell and expectations sharpen.
- Brand-Driven Ecosystems: Possession of a product-branded domain, and eventually direct IP control, transitions the service from a “feature” to a “destination”—vital for long-term defensibility against big tech encroachment.
For Legacy Tech Giants
- Integrated User Funnels: The greatest asset for incumbents is the ability to channel billions of users from their existing portals—search engines, email, productivity suites—into new AI offerings, often with a single click or API call.
- Infrastructure Leverage: Prior decades’ investments in worldwide backbone networks, datacenters, and traffic peering flow effortlessly into AI deployments, creating cost, performance, and resilience moats nearly impossible to replicate.
- Risks of Inertia: The very integration that confers advantages can also slow product unbundling, obscure branding of standalone AI offerings, and, as with Gemini, limit distinctiveness when competitive domains are already registered externally.
The Role of Internet Governance
All these visible moves on the game board—doman registrations, ASN establishment, peering policies—are governed and mediated by a sprawling, intricate ecosystem of Internet governance bodies. Multistakeholder organizations like ICANN, the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC), and country-level bodies help set the “rules of the road” for everything from address allocation to routing policy and technical standards. These frameworks are not mere administrative trivia—they determine who can scale, how, and under what terms.As AI services proliferate, the politics and practices of Internet governance will shape who gains or loses autonomy in global service provision. If, for example, future international agreements or technical standards make ASN or IP allocation more stringent, or embed stricter rules for data residency and sovereignty, then startups without early investments in their own infrastructure may find themselves blocked from critical markets or forced into expensive back-foot negotiations with upstream providers.
Case Study: DeepSeek and Cloudflare
One particularly illuminating example is DeepSeek—a rising Chinese AI star—opting to route its global presence via Cloudflare, a US-based infrastructure and security provider. While Cloudflare’s distributed edge network grants performance and resilience benefits, it also raises intricate questions around regulatory compliance, data residency, and exposure to cross-border policy shifts.Competition among Chinese AI startups like DeepSeek and their homegrown Internet titans (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) is not just a matter of algorithmic prowess or interface polish, but increasingly, one of who controls more of the physical and logical fabric of the Internet. Outsourcing control to foreign infrastructure suppliers, while offering a fast path to market, could become a strategic liability under tightening international and domestic regulation.
Challenges and Risks
While the technical advantages of proprietary infrastructure are clear, the investments required are prodigious. Securing ASNs, IP address blocks, and building redundant global connectivity is capital intensive and technically demanding. For all but the best-funded startups, this creates real barriers to matching Google or Microsoft’s infrastructure sovereignty.There is also a danger of further concentrating Internet “chokepoints” and power among a handful of entities. As AI services become mission critical, dependency on a tiny handful of networks—whether giant cloud providers, global CDNs, or a limited pool of root-level ASNs—may undermine resilience and stifle market diversity.
A further risk is the potential for regulatory overreach or fragmentation. As governments become ever more attuned to the strategic value of AI, there’s growing movement toward “digital sovereignty”—calls for mandatory data localization, network control, and compliance with national network policies. This could, paradoxically, force companies to spin up isolated, less optimal infrastructure just to meet divergent local rules, thereby driving up costs and snarling deployment timelines.
Future Trajectories
The landscape is in flux, but several future scenarios are clear:1. Startup “Infrastructure Maturity” Is Inevitable
As AI startups scale, the leap from relying on others’ networks to owning the physical and logical routing of their own service is inevitable—not just for performance or cost, but as table stakes for compliance, security, and long-term viability. Anthropic’s early move serves as a guidepost. Expect others to follow—through internal investment, strategic partnerships, or outright acquisition of smaller network providers.2. Integration vs. Independence Will Define Next-Gen AI Brand Wars
As AI becomes the default copilot for human and business workflows, the branding and UX border between generic domains and parent-company subdomains will take on new economic importance. “Who owns the user entry point?” will be the strategic question. Subdomain integration will continue to dominate among the largest incumbents, but pressure will mount to break out stand-alone AI brands as users demand clear, product-focused destinations.3. Governance Battles Are Looming
Waves of policy and technical battles will likely roil the field. Will ASN or address assignment policies change? Could stricter AI-oriented regulation shift the global flow of inference traffic or expose new vulnerabilities in transit? AI startups that invest early in governance fluency and technical compliance will have optionality others lack.4. Emergence of New Global Gatekeepers
Just as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud consolidated cloud service provision for a generation of digital startups, a fight is underway to become the core “platforms” for AI. Those with superior infrastructure, peering, and integration capabilities stand to intermediate not just traffic, but data, API monetization, and potentially trust itself.Conclusion: Infrastructure as Destiny in the Age of AI
To the casual observer, which chatbot powers which search page, or how seamlessly AI suggestions appear in everyday productivity tools, seems a matter of product design. In reality, the “front end” surface of the AI revolution is entirely shaped by back-end choices in domain registration, IP allocation, and routing sovereignty. The next decade of Internet rivalry—for talent, markets, and ideology—will be fought not only by algorithmic innovation or interface refinement, but in the hard-fought acquisition of network control and technical governance.For AI-centric startups, the challenges are formidable: speed to market must be balanced with an urgent race to acquire infrastructure autonomy. For entrenched Internet behemoths, the challenge is to integrate new AI capabilities without eroding the value of a century’s worth of catchment and trust, while remaining agile enough to unbundle offerings should market or regulatory winds shift.
Underneath every AI-powered interaction—every helpful suggestion, half-finished email, or generative leap—runs the hum of packets, DNS lookups, and BGP tables. The companies that grasp this full-stack reality, and invest in the hard, unglamorous work of Internet infrastructure mastery, will own not just the future of AI, but the very roads on which digital civilization travels.
Source: CircleID An Internet Infrastructure Perspective on AI Service Provision
