.openai
Is .openai a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.openai is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is OpenAI.
A company-owned namespace: useful to OpenAI for its own products, but not something outsiders can buy or resell.
the applicant itself and its product teams, for first-party addresses such as product, developer and documentation endpoints; no third-party buyer group exists
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: one dominant platform company putting its entire corporate identity on a coined house name, with the string serving as both brand consolidation and category-defining signal rather than as a space it sells to anyone.
Same bet in string-construction terms: a coined compound welded from two plain technology morphemes that a single firm has made proprietary, then carried as the primary identity across consumer products, developer surfaces, and enterprise sales.
Same bet, with the added wrinkle that the string also reads as a word the wider world already uses, so the application has to argue that one company's claim outweighs everyone else's ordinary use of it.
What a .openai domain is
.openai 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 .openai domain extension real yet?
.openai 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 .openai domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .openai name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .openai was .google, delegated on 15 September 2014.
Is .openai a real TLD?
Not yet. .openai is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .openai 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: 10-29 (vanity/joke/narrow). The record lists one application for .openai with an ICANN application type of brand, which by the rules of that type means registrations are restricted to the applicant and its affiliates; there is no open registration and therefore no aftermarket, so resale/brand strength for a buyer other than the applicant is effectively nil. It is not in the 30-49 band because that band presumes registrations by outside parties at volume or on price, which a brand-type TLD does not permit. It is not in the 1-9 band because, by analogy (flagged as analogy) with existing brand TLDs that major technology companies operate, the string has genuine primary-identity utility for its owner: a short, exactly-matching company name in the AI category, where first-party endpoints on the brand TLD could plausibly carry real traffic and signal authenticity against phishing look-alikes. Analogy from the 2012 round: some brand TLDs saw meaningful first-party use by their owners while many others were lightly used or later retired; outcome depends entirely on the owner's internal adoption choices, which are unknown here. The main market uncertainty is whether the owner routes primary product or developer traffic through the TLD versus keeping it as a defensive holding, since first-party adoption is the only source of value for a closed brand string; a second, smaller uncertainty is whether the owner ever opens a controlled program for partners, which would be unusual for this application type.