OpenAI has acquired ChatGPT.com through a settlement with the owner, the owner of the domain name Rick Latona confirmed in a tweet. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed by the seller. The domain is now redirecting to ChatGPT, the AI chatbot by OpenAI. The development was first reported by DomainInvesting.
I can officially confirm that we accepted OpenAI’s settlement offer. They now own chatgpt(.com). I cannot disclose any terms of the settlement, so please do not even ask. https://t.co/aam2uz2vmn
— Rick Latona 🦇🔊 (@RickLatona) September 11, 2023
The AI company had filed a UDRP complaint against ChatGPT.com earlier this year with World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The UDRP or the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy is a set of guidelines and procedures established by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to resolve disputes regarding domain names.
Before the complaint was filed, the domain hosted a blog with articles on AI and other technology topics. The website was dominated with ads of an AI chatbot aggregator ChatAI that lets users chat with GPT 3.5 and 4, Cohere and a few other LLMs on their WhatsApp or through text messages, for a monthly fee.
Based on the information available on Archive.org, the blog remained live until at least August 8. It was later taken down and eventually redirected to OpenAI’s chatbot. According to Similarweb, the website hosted on ChatGPT.com received between 1.5 million and 2.6 million visits per month from June to August.
Launched in November of last year, ChatGPT quickly grew to 100 million users, making it the fastest consumer app to reach that milestone. Despite a recent decline in visitors in recent months, its website still receives 1.4 billion visits every month. So it’s not surprising that ChatGPT.com was receiving over 2 million visits per month. Now, these visits will also be reflected in OpenAI’s numbers.
