OpenAI wants to own the letters "GPT"

OpenAI just hit a bizarre speed bump in its quest to own the hottest acronym in tech.

After watching copycat products like ThreatGPT, MedicalGPT, and DateGPT flood the market, the company tried to trademark "GPT" and asked the USPTO to fast-track the process. But the trademark office just threw the petition out because OpenAI's lawyers forgot to pay the required fee and didn't provide enough evidence.

Now, OpenAI is stuck waiting in the regular line for at least another five months.

The battle over three letters

OpenAI originally applied to trademark "GPT"—which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer—back in late December.

As hundreds of counterfeit apps sprouted up, OpenAI asked the government for special expediting last month. But according to the USPTO, OpenAI's legal team dropped the ball on both the filing fee and proper documentation.

Even after the five-month delay, winning the trademark isn't guaranteed, according to Jefferson Scher, an IP partner at Carr & Ferrell. The "T" in GPT refers to the Transformer architecture originally introduced by Google researchers in 2017, which is now widely used across the entire AI ecosystem.

There is precedent for generic origins turning into brands, like IBM, and OpenAI has used the term continuously since launching GPT-1 in October 2018. But until ChatGPT blew up overnight, OpenAI was mostly known only to researchers.

If the application passes the examiner, it will enter an opposition period where competitors can argue that "GPT" simply describes generative AI in general rather than pointing specifically to OpenAI.

Why it matters

We think this trademark fight puts every AI wrapper and startup on notice. As Scher warned, GPT is no longer just three random letters, and adopting it into a new product name right now is fundamentally risky.

For the broader industry, OpenAI is attempting to privatize terminology built on open research. The clever twist here is that a delayed timeline might actually help OpenAI. The longer this drags on, the more household recognition ChatGPT builds. If "GPT" achieves famous mark status similar to Rolex, OpenAI could legally sweep the term out of everyone else's hands across multiple categories.

However, the backlash from the open-source community and Big Tech rivals will likely be intense. Expect a very expensive, protracted legal battle over who gets to own the vocabulary of generative AI.