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Claim Your Handle: How AI.com's $70M Super Bowl Debut Traces Back to an Anime Chat App

During the Super Bowl, AI.com told millions of viewers to claim their handle on a revolutionary new AI platform. Five minutes in DevTools told a different story: the backend is Caish by Vaib Labs, a crypto-tokenized app for chatting with AI characters.

Jared Hass
Jared HassDeveloper and product designer

Yesterday, during the Super Bowl, a 30-second ad told roughly 120 million people to go claim their handle on ai.com — a "new AI platform" from Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek, who paid $70 million in crypto for the domain.

  • The pitch: autonomous, self-improving AI agents that perform real-world tasks.
  • The framing: revolutionary.
  • The domain: the most expensive ever sold.

So I did what I always do. I opened DevTools.

And within minutes, the story fell apart.

The frontend says Google only. The API says otherwise.#

On the surface, ai.com only lets you register through Google SSO. Clean, controlled, on-brand.

But poking through the client's network calls reveals a second auth path that the UI doesn't expose:

txt
POST https://api.ai.com/auth/email/send-otp
Content-Type: application/json

{"device_type": "web", "email": "test@example.com"}

This endpoint accepts an email, sends an OTP, and creates an account — no Google SSO required.

That's mildly interesting on its own: a hidden registration path that bypasses the only auth method the UI offers. We've seen this pattern before — multiple entry points, inconsistent enforcement.

But the OTP email is where things get revealing.

"449084 is your code for Caish"#

That's the email I received. Not "ai.com." Not "your AI agent." The subject line reads:

449084 is your code for Caish

And at the bottom of the email:

txt
Copyright © 2025 caish.vaib.me, All Rights Reserved.
Here's the full sign-up flow in action:

Caish. Not ai.com. A completely different product name, from a completely different domain, with a 2025 copyright.

A quick search leads here:

txt
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.vaib.caishen

Caish – Your AI Money App, published by Vaib Labs AI (VAIB US, INC.). 10+ downloads on the Play Store. Barely reviewed.

That's the backend that ai.com is sitting on.

Who is Vaib Labs?#

Vaib Labs AI (operating as VAIB US, INC.) ships three products:

  • Vaib Social: AI Agents — an AI character chat and roleplay app. Users create and interact with AI "influencers," earn points, send virtual gifts, and collect $VAIB token airdrops.
  • Vaib Assistant: AI Life Coach — a personal AI assistant named "Sam" that handles daily briefings, voice chat, email and calendar integration, news summaries, avatar generation, and general life coaching.
  • Caish – Your AI Money App — an AI-powered finance assistant. The one whose OTP flow ai.com just triggered.

The parent site, vaib.me, is tokenized with $VAIB and runs a points-and-referral economy:

"Deeper connections mean bigger earnings. The more you engage (or get engaged with), the higher your rewards. Don't miss out — start earning points now and secure your $VAIB airdrop."

This isn't a stealth infrastructure provider. This is a crypto-native AI character chat platform with a token economy and a gift-based monetization model.

The agent interface is Vaib Assistant with a new skin#

After ai.com posted their agent UI on X, the resemblance became impossible to ignore.

The ai.com agent screen shows a grid of action cards:

  • Set me up — "I'm new here. Ask me 8 quick questions to personalize..."
  • Voice intro — "Send me a short voice note to intr..."
  • Generate your avatar — "Generate an avatar of what y..."
  • Daily update — "Give me a 3-minute briefing each morning..."
  • Connect my email — "Walk me through connecting my email step-by-step."
  • Connect my calendar — "Walk me through connecting my c..."
  • Summarize the news

Now look at Vaib Assistant's published feature set from its Google Play and App Store listings:

  • Personalized onboarding — "Sam adapts to your goals and grows with you"
  • Voice interactions — "Talk to Sam through text or voice anytime, anywhere"
  • AI image generation — avatar and profile picture generation across the Vaib ecosystem
  • Daily news briefings — "Get the latest headlines from Sam, personalised to you" (shipped as the "news anchor experience" per App Store update notes)
  • Email integration — listed as a feature, temporarily removed: "We are upgrading our integrations and have removed it temporarily" per App Store update notes
  • Calendar integration — same status
  • News summaries — core feature of the assistant

This isn't a coincidence of feature overlap. The card layout, the onboarding flow, the voice-first interaction model, the daily briefing, the email/calendar hooks — it's the same product with a different name on the title bar.

Vaib Assistant calls her "Sam." ai.com calls it "your AI agent." The feature grid is the same.

The product catalog endpoint#

After authenticating through the email OTP path, another endpoint tells you everything about ai.com's monetization before it's publicly announced:

txt
GET https://api.ai.com/product/product-catalog?tags=subscription&is_visible=true

The response includes three tiers:

Free (aibot.tier.free.local):

  • Secure cloud virtual machine
  • Claude Opus 4.5 access
  • Limited messages & agent actions
  • Limited voice & image generation

Plus (aibot.tier.plus) — $30/mo:

  • 10x the usage of free
  • Dedicated, always-on compute & storage
  • Priority Claude Opus 4.6 access
  • More messages & agent actions

Pro (aibot.tier.pro) — $300/mo:

  • 100x the usage of free
  • Dedicated, always-on compute & storage
  • Priority Claude Opus 4.6 access
  • Maximum messages & agent actions
  • Priority customer support
  • Native ai.com email & calendar (coming soon)

And every new account gets a referral code:

json
{
  "referralCode": "REF-fmkMkmFIIV"
}

Which maps directly to the referral-driven growth model that Vaib Labs already runs across its other apps.

Same schema, different domain#

At this point I wanted to see how deep the connection went. So I checked the Vaib API directly:

txt
GET https://api.vaib.me/payment/product/get-purchase-products

Here's a product from Vaib's catalog:

json
{
  "productId": "consumable.junior.minute.2",
  "label": "2 mins",
  "credits": "2",
  "usdValue": "2",
  "tags": ["chat"],
  "appleProductId": "consumable.junior.minute.2",
  "googleProductId": "consumable.junior.minute.2",
  "tokenValue": "160783.30410091887"
}

And here's a product from ai.com's catalog:

txt
https://api.ai.com/product/product-catalog
json
{
  "productId": "aibot.tier.free.local",
  "label": "free",
  "subtitle": "try the magic",
  "credits": "0",
  "usdValue": "0",
  "tags": ["subscription"],
  "features": ["secure cloud virtual machine", "claude opus 4.5 access"],
  "appleProductId": "",
  "googleProductId": "",
  "subscriptionType": "free",
  "sortOrder": 0
}

Same productId, label, credits, usdValue, tags, appleProductId, googleProductId schema. ai.com's response adds a few fields (subtitle, features, subscriptionType, sortOrder) and drops tokenValue — but the skeleton is identical. This is the same product catalog system with the crypto-specific fields stripped out and subscription fields bolted on.

These aren't two platforms that happen to look similar. This is one codebase serving two frontends.

The timeline doesn't add up#

Marszalek says he acquired the ai.com domain in April 2025 and has been "building a team" since. The OTP email carries a 2025 copyright for caish.vaib.me. Vaib's app ecosystem has been live since at least 2023, with Vaib: AI Character Chat & RP unpublished from the Play Store in December 2024 and relaunched as Vaib Social: AI Agents in March 2025.

The infrastructure wasn't built for ai.com. It was built by Vaib Labs, and ai.com was parked on top of it.

What this actually is#

Strip away the Super Bowl ad, the $70 million domain, and the AGI press release, and here's what you have:

  • A frontend-only registration gate (Google SSO) that's trivially bypassed via an exposed OTP endpoint
  • A backend that identifies itself as Caish, a product of Vaib Labs AI
  • An auth flow that sends emails branded with a different company's copyright
  • An agent interface whose feature grid maps 1:1 to Vaib Assistant: AI Life Coach
  • A product catalog that shares its schema with Vaib's existing payment API
  • A referral system identical to Vaib's existing token-driven growth model
  • An underlying platform whose flagship product is an AI character chat app with a $VAIB token airdrop

Kris Marszalek told the press his goal is to build "a decentralized network of autonomous, self-improving AI agents that perform real-world tasks for the good of humanity."

What he actually shipped is a re-skinned Vaib Labs deployment behind a $70 million domain name.

Why this matters#

This isn't about whether Vaib's tech works or whether ai.com will eventually build something real. It's about the gap between what was sold and what was shipped.

A Super Bowl ad costs roughly $8 million for 30 seconds. The domain cost $70 million. The press tour framed this as a platform built from scratch to mainstream autonomous AI.

But the OTP email says Caish. The copyright says vaib.me. The product catalog shares its schema with an anime chat app's payment API. And the "revolutionary" agent interface is a feature-for-feature match of an existing life coach app called Sam.

When the marketing says "revolutionary new platform" and the backend says "we white-labeled an existing app," that's not a technical detail. That's the whole story.

Closing thought#

The internet was told to "claim your handle" on the future of AI.

In reality, they were signing up for a re-packaged crypto-adjacent chat app from a company most people have never heard of.

$70 million buys a very good domain name.

It does not, apparently, buy a fresh git init.

Sources#

Open to conversations.

Interested in collaboration? This is where you can find me.

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© 2026 Jared HassLast updated Nov 2026

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