.oai
Is .oai a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.oai is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is OpenAI.
A closed company-only domain for OpenAI: useful to that one owner as a short branded address, but nobody else can buy or resell names on it.
a single brand owner (the applicant, OpenAI) and its own products, teams, and campaigns; not open to the public, so there is no third-party buyer group
The 2012 applications making the most similar bet. Chosen by AI from every string in that round, without being told what happened to any of them.
Same bet: a dominant tech company claiming its insider short-form abbreviation as a compact corporate namespace alongside its full wordmark, betting that the abbreviation already reads as the company to the people who matter.
Same bet: a three-letter technology-platform initialism owned by one company and aimed at developers and enterprise customers rather than consumers, where the string works only if that audience already decodes the letters.
Same bet shape — a tech firm's ticker-style contraction of its own name run as a single-company namespace — but it leans on a stock-market shorthand rather than a product-ecosystem one, so the recognition it banks on is narrower.
What a .oai domain is
.oai is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Brand. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .oai domain extension real yet?
.oai is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. It is a string applicants have put forward in the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, the process that decides whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .oai domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .oai name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .oai was .goog, delegated on 24 January 2015.
Is .oai a real TLD?
Not yet. .oai is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .oai is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- OpenAI · first recordedICANN
- Band chosen: 30-49 (usable but limited), at its floor. The record shows one application, by OpenAI, with ICANN application type 'brand' and no contention, so this is a closed, single-registrant namespace: the only buyer is the applicant itself. It sits above the 10-29 band because the best-fit buyer is a serious, globally recognized AI company and 'oai' is a short, widely understood abbreviation of its name, so a primary-identity use (product surfaces, short links, internal and partner endpoints) is plausible rather than a vanity gesture. It stays below 50-69 because there is no market to sustain: no public registrations, no aftermarket, and no resale value for anyone other than the owner, so 'demand' cannot be measured in the usual sense. By analogy (flagged as analogy), many single-brand TLDs from the earlier round were kept defensive or lightly used, and a minority were adopted as real identity surfaces by their owners; the outcome for .oai depends on which path the owner takes. Main market uncertainty: whether OpenAI actually migrates visible product or developer surfaces onto .oai within 5 years, or holds it primarily as a defensive and experimental asset while its existing domains remain the public identity.