The US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) rejected OpenAI’s request to trademark the term GPT, short for generative pre-trained transformer, stating that GPT is too broad to be trademarked and could hinder competitors from accurately labeling their products as GPT.

OpenAI stated in its application that GPT is not a common term and consumers may not easily grasp its meaning.

In its decision on February 6th, the PTO stated that consumer awareness of the term GPT is not crucial, as those familiar with the technology recognize it as a general software type, not exclusive to OpenAI products.

With the emergence of generative AI, numerous other AI services have incorporated GPT into their product titles. For instance, there is an AI detector startup called GPTZero. Many companies commonly use the term GPTs to describe their core AI models because that’s exactly what they are.

GPT became strongly associated with OpenAI following the rise in popularity of ChatGPT and its AI models, GPT-3 (and subsequently GPT-4). Upon opening ChatGPT to outside developers, the company also referred to its custom chatbots as GPTs. Recently, OpenAI has started assigning unique brand names to other services. Sora, the new text-to-video generation model, was recently launched.

Points out that the US previously rejected OpenAI’s trademark claim for GPT in May 2023. The company has the option to submit another appeal to the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board in order to try to get the term GPT trademarked.