GPT as a Trademark: the EUIPO Examines When a Technical Acronym May Be Descriptive

Can an acronym identifying a technology also function as a trademark?

This is one of the issues addressed by the Fifth Board of Appeal of the EUIPO in its decision of August 17, 2026, case R 2411/2025-5, concerning the word mark “GPT.”

The proceedings arose from a request for a declaration of invalidity filed against the “GPT” trademark, which was registered for goods and services related to software, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning.

The Cancellation Division declared the trademark invalid, and OpenAI appealed the decision. The Board of Appeal upheld this ruling.

The central issue analyzed is whether “GPT,” an acronym for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer,” was perceived by the relevant public as a descriptive term for the technology to which it refers.

To answer this question, the Board distinguished between the meaning of the full expression and how the acronym was being used. The fact that an expression is descriptive does not necessarily imply that its acronym is also descriptive. Rather, it must be established that the acronym itself is in use and recognized as having that meaning by the relevant public.

In this regard, the Board notes that it is not necessary for the entire relevant public to share this perception. It is sufficient that a significant portion of the public perceives it as a technical designation for that technology. In this case, that portion of the public specifically consists of professionals in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, and software development.

The Board as such focused its analysis on determining whether this perception existed among these professionals regarding “GPT” at the time of the relevant date, December 27, 2022. To this end, particular importance was placed on the technical and academic literature published prior to this date demonstrating that the acronym was already being used to identify this technology, without needing to reconstruct its meaning from “Generative Pre-trained Transformer.” In contrast, dictionaries published after the relevant date and information from Wikipedia have limited probative value given that they do not establish what the perception of this term was at that time.

Based on this analysis, the Board concluded that “GPT” established a sufficiently direct link to a descriptive characteristic of the registered goods and services, which confirmed the invalidity of the trademark pursuant to Article 7(1)(c) of the European Union Trademark Regulation.

The Board remanded the case to the Cancellation Division to examine whether “GPT” has acquired distinctiveness through use despite its descriptive nature.

This decision highlights that a technical acronym as a trademark requires an analysis that goes beyond the meaning of the words comprising it. It is essential to determine how the acronym is actually being used, who the relevant public is, and how that public perceived the trademark at the time of the relevant date. This without it being necessary for the meaning to be known by the average consumer.

September 9, 2026