Recently, OpenAI has filed an application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to register the "OpenAI o1" trademark for its latest AI model, "o1." This move aims to strengthen the protection of its intellectual property. Notably, documents reveal that as early as May of this year, OpenAI had submitted a trademark application for "o1" to Jamaica, at a time when the model had not yet been publicly released.

Currently, the USPTO has not officially granted OpenAI the "o1" trademark, and the application is pending assignment to a examining attorney for further processing.

OpenAI stated that o1, as its first "reasoning" model, is expected to expand into a series of models capable of performing complex tasks. These reasoning models conduct self-verification by thinking more deeply about problems and queries, thereby avoiding common AI pitfalls.

To date, OpenAI has submitted approximately 30 trademark registration applications, including "ChatGPT," "Sora," "GPT-4o," and "DALL-E." However, in February of this year, OpenAI encountered setbacks when applying to register the "GPT" trademark. The USPTO deemed the term too generic and rejected the application, noting that "GPT" (an abbreviation for Generative Pre-trained Transformer) was already widely used in other fields and by other companies at the time OpenAI filed.

In terms of trademark protection, OpenAI has been relatively cautious, being proactive only in one case. The company has been engaged in a months-long dispute over the usage rights of the name "Open AI" with technologist and entrepreneur Guy Raven. Raven claims that in 2015, the founding year of OpenAI, he proposed an "open-source" AI vision that included the name. Earlier this fall, the Federal Circuit Court issued an initial injunction ruling favoring OpenAI, suggesting that OpenAI is likely to prevail in this dispute.