The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected OpenAI’s attempt to register the “GPT” trademark, ruling that the term is “merely descriptive” and therefore cannot be registered. This is a blow to the OpenAI brand, but don’t expect its competitors to start releasing their own version of the ubiquitous chatbot.
ChatGPT is certainly the most recognizable name in AI today, being the most popular conversation model on the market and the one that has most visibly taken huge language models from curiosity to global trend.
However, according to the USPTO, the name does not meet the standards for trademark registration or the protections afforded by the “TM” after the name. (By the way, they refused back in October and this is a “FINAL” all-caps rejection of the application).
As the denial document states:
Registration is refused because the trade mark applied for merely describes a feature, function or feature of the applicant’s goods and services.
OpenAI argued that it popularized the term GPT, which in this case stands for “generatively trained transformer,” to describe the nature of a machine learning model. It is generative in that it produces up-to-date (approximately) material, pre-trained in the sense that it is a huge model trained centrally on a proprietary database, and transformer is the name of a particular method of building artificial intelligence (discovered by Google researchers in 2017), which allows for training much larger models.
However, the patent office pointed out that GPT was already used in many other contexts and by other companies in related ones. For example, Amazon has a list of what GPT is and how it is used.
The patent side’s argument is that GPT describes an aspect of the product. It’s like eating a cereal called Crunchy O’s and trying to trademark “crunchy.” In the case of ChatGPT, it is the GPT AI model – a concept that OpenAI did not create and is not the only one in its offering – that you are talking to. It may be recognizable but does not meet the requirements for a trademark.
Perhaps this lack of trademark will weaken OpenAI’s dominance over GPT-related terminology. You can expect things like “TalkGPT” to appear in app stores, unrelated (it’s actually already there and there’s plenty of it) – and OpenAI can’t sue them for using their branding.
That said, OpenAI has by far the highest share of awareness when someone says “GPT”, so while their legal protection is confined, they retain a first-name advantage. If anything, they could double down on the GPT branding, trademarks be damned, to let everyone know OpenAI did it first (or close enough).