Did OpenAI just spend more than $10 million on a URL?

On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted a simple URL on X: chat.com. It automatically routes to ChatGPT.

Previously, the domain was owned by Dharmesh Shah, the founder and CTO of HubSpot. In early 2023, Shah purchased chat.com for $15.5 million. However, just a few months later, he announced that he had sold the domain, though he wouldn’t disclose the details of the sale or the buyer. Notably, he did confirm that he sold the domain for more than he had originally paid for it.

“The reason I bought chat.com is simple: I think Chat-based UX (#ChatUX) is the next big thing in software. Communicating with computers/software through a natural language interface is much more intuitive. This is made possible by Generative A.I,” Shah wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing the purchase, which chat.com briefly redirected to before he resold it.

After the publication of this article, Shah confirmed in a post on X that OpenAI did purchase the domain from him and implied that the startup paid him in shares instead of cash.

The drop of “GPT” from the chat.com domain aligns with OpenAI’s recent rebranding efforts.

In September, the company announced a new series of reasoning models starting with “o1.” At the time, former chief research officer Bob McGrew told The Verge he hoped that the o1 series would mark “the first step of newer, more sane names” to better communicate the company’s work.

People hoarding “vanity domains” is a tale as old as the Internet itself. Just a few months ago, AI startup Friend spent $1.8 million on the domain friend.com after raising $2.5 million in funding. Having just raised $6.6 billion, OpenAI dropping more than $10 million —in cash or stock — is just a drop in the bucket.

Update, November 6, 2024: Added Shah’s confirmation of the domain sale.