The companies that build the large AI models did not arrive at the 2026 round in the same way. Some filed dozens of applications, some filed two, and for a number of well-known names no published filing says anything at all. This piece counts both sides, and says exactly how the second side was measured.
Who filed
Each line below is an applicant. Where several applicants are gathered on one line, it is because their filings declare the same ultimate control Q108; where no ultimate control is published, the line says so.
| Applicant, and what it declares | Applications | Of which brand TLDs | Strings include |
|---|---|---|---|
| Charleston Road Registry Inc. — ultimate control: Alphabet Inc. | 39 | 20 | .gemini, .gemma, .deepmind, .agent, .api, .intelligence, .mcp |
| Meta Registry Holdings LLC — ultimate control: Meta Platforms, Inc. | 18 | 12 | .llama, .metaai, .superintelligence, .agent |
| OPENAI OPCO, LLC — no ultimate control published; shareholder: OpenAi Group PBC (Q106) | 15 | 5 | .openai, .chatgpt, .gpt, .codex, .agent, .agi, .asi, .mcp, .evals |
| Five applicants — ultimate control: Bytedance Ltd. | 9 | 9 | .doubao, .tiktok, .capcut, .douyin, .抖音 |
| Amazon Registry Services, Inc. — ultimate control: Amazon.com, Inc. | 8 | 8 | .alexa, .echo, .kuiper |
| Three applicants — ultimate control: Alibaba Group Holding Limited | 7 | 3 | .qwen, .wan, .alicloud, .agent, .api, .skill |
| Anthropic, PBC — no ultimate control published | 2 | 2 | .anthropic, .claude |
| Microsoft Corporation — no ultimate control published | 2 | 2 | .copilot, .msft |
Two shapes appear. Anthropic, Microsoft, Amazon and ByteDance file brand TLDs only. Google, Meta, OpenAI and Alibaba also file common words: four of them are among the thirteen applicants for .agent, and Google and OpenAI both ask for .mcp.
Anthropic filed two applications, and appears a third time without being an applicant: Google's community application for .mcp states that Anthropic "has provided a letter of support" Q156. The letter itself is an attachment, and ICANN does not publish attachments.
Mentioned, but not applicants
Some names appear in the text of someone else's filing and nowhere as an applicant or a declared affiliate. Among them: Baidu (cited in two IDN filings by Beijing TLD Registry Q128), WeChat (in the mission of .aio Q133), Scale AI (in the mission of .agi Q133) and Hugging Face (listed among the organisations endorsing the community application for .agent Q156).
What no published filing declares
No published filing declares any of the following, on any of the terms tested:
- Apple — terms tested: Apple Inc, Apple Distribution, Siri.
- Nvidia — Nvidia.
- xAI and the other companies associated with Elon Musk — xAI, x.AI, Grok, X Corp, Twitter, Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, Musk.
- Mistral AI — Mistral.
- Cohere — Cohere Inc, Cohere AI, Cohere Technologies.
- Perplexity — Perplexity.
- DeepSeek — DeepSeek, 深度求索.
- Other Chinese model developers — Tencent, Zhipu, Moonshot, Kimi, MiniMax, iFlytek, SenseTime.
None of these terms is an applied-for string, an applicant name, or a word in any published answer.
The bounds of that statement. Each term was tested on its own, as a whole word, against three things in each of the 1,614 filings: the applied-for string, the applicant's name, and every answer ICANN published. The same terms were then tested against the 1,169 replacement strings of ICANN's export and the names of their applicants: no match. Two things could not be searched: attachments, which ICANN does not publish, and anything a filing does not declare. An applicant that does not name its group is invisible to this measure by construction.
An absence here can have at least three causes: no application; an application through an entity that does not name the group; a name that sits only in an attachment. The data does not tell them apart, and this piece does not choose one.
China, as the filings show it
76 applications come from an applicant domiciled in mainland China (51), Hong Kong (21) or Taiwan (4). Several of the largest Chinese groups file from Singapore instead, and are not in that count: ByteDance's .tiktok and .capcut, Alibaba's .qwen, .wan and .alicloud.
On AI-related strings, the applicants from that region include Elegant Leader Limited, Hong Kong (.agent, .api, .skill, .opc), whose .agent filing says it "is part of the Alibaba Group of companies" Q133; FireLabs Capital Ltd, Hong Kong (.agent); AI Safety Asia Limited, Hong Kong (.agt); Verse International Limited, Hong Kong (.did); Pingyang Chamber of Commerce in Haishu District of Ningbo (.robot); and Beijing Zhuoyue Yutong Technology Co., Ltd. for .人工智能, "artificial intelligence" in Chinese.
The consumer platforms file their product names: .doubao and .qwen are both there, as brand TLDs. Beyond those two groups, none of the Chinese model developers tested above appears in a filing. The list of terms is the whole of that statement: a developer that is not on it was not tested.
Sources
- The 1,614 published filings, ICANN APS, snapshot of 8 October 2026; counts by applicant and by declared ultimate control Q108.
- Term search run on the same snapshot; the terms are those listed above, nothing else is implied.
- All applications in the "AI & agents" theme.