A Hurricane Erased Anguilla's Economy. Two Letters Are Rebuilding It.
Anguilla, population 16,000, now gets close to half its government revenue from leasing out the two letters after its own name. It's paying for hospitals, school upkeep, and an airport.
What was checked, and what could not be.
- Every dollar/EC$ figure and date in the Article and ELI5 tabs traces to a specific link in the dossier, each confirmed live (HTTP 200) immediately before filing: the 1995 assignment and 2009 open-registration date to Wikipedia's .ai entry; the 2017 Hurricane Irma damage figures (EC$880.4m / ~US$320m against EC$909.76m total 2017 economic output) and Victor Banks's 2018 budget address to The Anguillian's 2021 Irma retrospective; the 2023 figures (354,000 registrations, EC$87m/~$32m, ~20% of government revenue) and Ellis Webster's cautionary quotes to the AP wire piece as carried by Yahoo Finance; the October 2024 Identity Digital deal and January 2025 migration to Anguilla Focus's report on that move; the September 2025 "47 percent" and "gift from God" quotes from Minister José Vanterpool to Anguilla Focus and The Anguillian's own coverage of his BBC Radio 5 Live interview; the 2025 total (EC$230,499,740.50 / ~$85.3m, versus a EC$132m draft forecast) and the February 2026 EC$32.8m monthly record to Anguilla Focus's windfall report; the January 2026 one-millionth registration and Premier Cora Richardson Hodge's "far more than domain registrations" quote to the Daily Herald; the June 2026 total of 1,277,727 registrations to Sherwood News and Yahoo Finance; the bot.ai $1.2m resale to DNJournal; and the Dale Carty quotes and Irma-recovery narrative to adventure.com.
- IMF's own "An AI-Powered Boost to Anguilla's Revenues" report (imf.org) returned HTTP 403 on every attempt, including with a spoofed browser User-Agent and a direct fetch. It is not in the dossier and nothing in the piece is attributed to having been read directly from it. The IMF's general finding that the revenue helps diversify Anguilla's economy is well corroborated by other, directly-confirmed sources and is only referenced in that general form.
- An early search result described Hurricane Irma as having "wiped out approximately 90% of Anguilla's GDP." That figure does not appear in the directly-fetched source (The Anguillian's retrospective) and appears to conflate a real, separate statistic, roughly 90 percent of government buildings damaged, with a GDP-destruction percentage. The piece uses the more precise, directly-sourced comparison instead: EC$880.4m in ECLAC-estimated damage against Anguilla's full 2017 economic output of EC$909.76m, both from Victor Banks's 2018 budget address.
- Some secondary sources describe the .ai revenue share as a percentage of "GDP." The government's own quoted framing (Vanterpool to BBC Radio 5 Live, as carried by Anguilla Focus and Wikipedia's citation of the same interview) consistently describes it as a share of government revenue, not GDP. The piece uses "government revenue" throughout.
- Figures for 2024 and 2025 .ai revenue appear in different sources denominated in EC dollars without always saying so, which produces numbers that look inconsistent at a glance (e.g. "$104.25m" for 2024, "$230,499,740.50" for 2025). Anguilla Focus's own reporting states these are EC dollar figures; converted at roughly EC$2.70 to US$1, they match the "$39 million" (2024) and "$85.3 million" (2025) USD figures used elsewhere and in this piece. The piece uses USD figures for readability, giving the EC$ source figure alongside on first use.
- The Tuvalu/.tv comparison and the characterization that a similar windfall faded over time are sourced to PYMNTS's own reporting, which attributes the .tv decline specifically to streaming-industry consolidation reducing the domain's appeal, not independently re-derived by this outlet.
- Every named individual (Vanterpool, Premier Cora Richardson Hodge, former Premier Ellis Webster, former Minister of Finance Victor Banks, chef Dale Carty) is quoted in a clearly public, on-the-record capacity, as a government official speaking officially or a business owner named in published press. No private individuals appear in this piece.
- Link liveness: all dossier links were checked with curl for a 200 response using a browser User-Agent immediately before this plate was filed. No link in the final dossier returned a non-200 status.