The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has rejected OpenAI's application for the 'GPT' trademark. The rejection was based on the trademark GPT merely describing the features, functions, or characteristics of the products and services of OpenAI. According to USPTO, GPT is an abbreviation for ‘Generative Pre-trained Transformer,’ and the USPTO's examiner judged that “this explains OpenAI’s service.”

The USPTO's examining attorney further stated that “Consumers who encounter the abbreviation ‘GPT’ will understand it to be a feature of OpenAI’s software products and services, which are ‘pre-trained generative transducers,’” and added, “Because this is a general description of such services, it is a registered trademark of OpenAI.” “It is not suitable,” he pointed out.

With this decision, it is expected that many AI chatbot services, including GPT, will appear in the future. Domain Name Wire explained, “Many domain investors have already acquired domain names containing GPT,” and “Other AI-related services are also using names containing this term.”

You could read the full USPTO's ruling here.

Whether OpenAI will appeal the decisions is unknown at this time, though the ruling, based on common trademark guidelines, is unlikely to change.

Yet with that said, not all is lost considering that GPT-4 was actually registered as a trademark by USPTO under Serial #97836275 on November 28, 2023 as noted in the USPTO image below.

Further, OpenAI's GPT-3 was also registered by USPTO under serial #90092493. Other versions such as GPT-5, GPTO-6  and GPT-7 are currently pending. Lastly, OpenAI's 'Chat-GPT' trademark filing is also pending.

In other OpenAI news today, CNBC reports that the company has introduced Sora, its new generative AI model. Sora works similarly to OpenAI’s image-generation AI tool, DALL-E. A user types out a desired scene and Sora will return a high-definition video clip. Sora can also generate video clips inspired by still images, and extend existing videos or fill in missing frames. For more on this click here.