The company is now protecting its intellectual property as it has applied for trademark registration of its new AI model, o1.

On Tuesday, OpenAI filed an application to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to register the trademark "OpenAI o1." Of particular interest is that OpenAI has filed for a foreign trademark application in Jamaica since May this year, months before it introduced o1.

OpenAI has yet to receive a trademark from the USPTO. As indicated by the office's online database, the trademark application remains pending assignment to an examining attorney.

OpenAI has said that it intends for o1, its first "reasoning" model, to expand into a series of models trained to perform complex tasks. Unlike most models, reasoning models effectively fact-check themselves by spending more time considering a question or query — helping them avoid some common AI pitfalls.

OpenAI, which has filed for around 30 trademark registrations to date, including for "ChatGPT," "Sora," "GPT-4o," and "DALL-E," famously failed to trademark "GPT" in February after the USPTO ruled that the term was too generic. GPT, which stands for "Generative Pre-trained Transformer," was in use in other contexts and by other companies when OpenAI submitted its request, the office noted.

OpenAI hasn’t aggressively asserted its trademarks yet — save for one. For several months, the startup has been fighting technologist and entrepreneur Guy Ravine for the right to use “Open AI,” which Ravine claims he pitched as a part of an “open source” AI vision around 2015 — OpenAI’s founding year.

OpenAI was supported by a preliminary injunction by a federal circuit court earlier this fall that it would prevail against Ravine.