OpenAI moves to trademark its o1 reasoning models

Naming an AI model is easy, but actually owning the name is a whole different legal headache. OpenAI knows this better than anyone, having learned the hard way.

On Tuesday, OpenAI officially filed paperwork with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to lock down the trademark for "OpenAI o1." The documents also revealed a sneaky bit of foresight: OpenAI had already filed for the trademark in Jamaica back in May, months before the reasoning model was even announced to the public.

The USPTO hasn't granted the application just yet. According to its database, the filing is currently waiting to be assigned to an examining attorney.

Dodging the "GPT" disaster

OpenAI's urgency makes complete sense when you remember what happened to "GPT."

The company has filed around 30 trademark applications to date, covering big names like ChatGPT, Sora, GPT-4o, and DALL-E. But back in February, OpenAI famously lost its bid to trademark "GPT." The USPTO rejected it on the grounds that Generative Pre-trained Transformer is a generic acronym that was already being widely used across the tech industry.

With o1, OpenAI is taking zero chances. The startup has already made it clear that o1, its flagship "reasoning" model that spends extra time thinking and fact-checking before answering, will expand into an entire family of models for complex problem-solving. If o1 is the future product line, OpenAI wants bulletproof legal walls around it.

Meanwhile, the company is still fighting an ongoing trademark battle over its very own name. Entrepreneur Guy Ravine claims he pitched an "Open AI" vision back in 2015, OpenAI's founding year. OpenAI caught a break earlier this fall when a federal circuit court upheld a preliminary injunction in its favor, ruling that the startup is likely to prevail.

Why it matters

We think this trademark filing shows OpenAI has completely evolved its corporate playbook from open research lab to aggressive commercial incumbent.

Losing the trademark for "GPT" was a massive branding stumble that allowed practically every rival to slap GPT onto their own wrapper tools. By pivoting to an arbitrary moniker like "o1" and quietly securing international filings months before launch via Jamaica, OpenAI is ensuring that nobody else can free-ride on its new reasoning category.

For developers and enterprise customers, it signals that the o1 moniker is here to stay as a long-term enterprise brand, not just an experimental preview. But building a legal moat is the easy part. The real test is whether OpenAI can keep o1 performant and cheap enough to justify developers sticking inside its walled garden as open-source reasoning models inevitably close the gap.