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

By Kylie Robison , a senior AI reporter working with The Verge's policy and tech teams. She previously worked at Fortune Magazine and Business Insider.

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.

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