OpenAI has bought the URL of what used to be an adult video chat website for more than $15,500,000

Head over to chat.com and you’ll notice you’re redirected to chatgpt.com, where you can talk with one of OpenAI’s LLM chatbots. The Verge pointed this out after noticing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Tweeted (or rather, “X’d”?) just the chat.com URL, presumably because the redirect had just gone live.

The previous owner of the URL was HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah who purchased it in 2023 for $15.5 million. According to a Wikipedia list of the most expensive domains, it’s the third most expensive URL on the internet, after voice.com and 360.com. Last year, Shah confirmed he sold the URL for more than he paid for it, so we can infer that OpenAI bought it for more than $15,500,000.

We don’t know exactly how much higher than this number the URL sold for. But while Shah doesn’t give us a figure, he does give us a detailed prompt for GPT o1, asking for it to provide an “approximate range”, which he says the model “does a really good job of reasoning through.”

I put this prompt into ChatGPT and it came up with a domain sale price of $20 million to $25 million, with 50% to 70% of this being OpenAI shares.

It’s a catchy and versatile URL, of course, so that it’s going for a lot of cash isn’t too surprising. At least according to some archived snapshots of the website from as recently as 2019, the chat.com URL used to lead to an adult video cam and chat room website. (How much of the internet do they say is pornographic, again?)

Shah’s confirmation that OpenAI was the company to purchase the chat.com URL came when he said the “secret acquirer of [the] $15+ million domain chat.com [is] revealed and it’s exactly who you’d think.”

It’s “exactly who you’d think” because, well, what other big player can you think of that would be as keen to use “chat” in its branding? If there’s one company that could become synonymous with “chat” branding, as broad as that term is, it would be OpenAI with its ChatGPT models.

And if you’re wondering why a not-for-profit company would care so much about branding: don’t. It’s now not even an open secret so much as an open fact that OpenAI is vying to become for-profit. Just a few days ago the company began discussing the possibility with the California attorney general’s office.

I’m a little skeptical of some recent talk about ChatGPT having already done a lot of this rebranding, however, given that the Chat/ChatGPT website and model selector still says ChatGPT, not “OpenAI Chat” or just “Chat”. Plus, “ChatGPT” is such a ubiquitous name, now, that I wonder how beneficial it would be to switch away from the branding.

Then again, if AI chat really does become a new standard for interfacing with all our tech, it might make sense to pivot towards a more general branding for the long term.