The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, in separate decisions issued in early February, denied OpenAI’s applications to trademark “ChatGPT” and “GPT.”
OpenAI has the option to appeal the decisions to the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board within three months. But if the rulings stand, they will prevent the company from defending its exclusive use of the phrases, opening them up to widespread adoption as common terms across the industry.
The trademark examining attorney wrote, in part:
… Internet evidence shows that “CHAT” means “a synchronous exchange of remarks over a computer network.” Further, the evidence of record also establishes that “GPT” is a widely used acronym that means “generative pre trained transformers,” which are neural network models that “give applications the ability to create human-like text and content (images, music, and more), and answer questions in a conversational manner.”
We’ve contacted OpenAI for comment on the USPTO rulings. OpenAI’s brand guidelines currently prevent partners and developers from using “GPT” in their product or app names “because it confuses end users.”
OpenAI’s key partner, Microsoft, has adopted the phrase “Copilot” in conjunction with its chat-based AI products. The Redmond company has applied for related trademarks in conjunction with other brand names, such as GitHub Copilot.
However, our searches on the USPTO site today did not find any standalone Copilot trademark applications by Microsoft except for one related to the Copilot logo.
Microsoft was involved in a high-stakes legal battle two decades ago over the validity of its Windows trademark, the company’s biggest product at the time, before settling the case with the Linux OS vendor “Lindows” in 2004.
News of the “GPT” trademark rejection surfaced on the news site Tech Startups on Feb. 7, and was reported earlier today by Hacker News and Boing Boing. GeekWire found the additional denial of the “ChatGPT” trademark application in our own searches this morning on the USPTO site.
