OpenAI unveiled a brand-new offering on Tuesday: Dots, an always-active AI agent sporting a cheerful, blobby avatar. The whimsical character might bring a grin to users' faces, but the loudest chuckle over this launch is likely coming from Elon Musk — the former OpenAI founder who departed, started rival Grok, and lost a lawsuit against the company. The reason? The domain "dot.com" is owned by Musk's xAI and currently sends visitors to the download page for xAI's Grok chatbot app. Whois domain records show that the domain name changed hands just this July.

It's completely plausible that xAI acquired the domain for ordinary business reasons. "Dot" could simply be a misspelling of "bot," so the company may have snapped it up to capture mistyped searches. We've contacted xAI to ask. Yet xAI doesn't hold the "bot.com" name, nor does it own other equally obvious typo domains such as "vot.com," which is currently up for sale.

The internet's take is far more entertaining: that Musk — or his team — orchestrated a prank, catching wind of OpenAI's new product and its name and purchasing the domain. In fact, an anonymous X user and xAI observer, @birdabo (who describes themselves as "chief shitposting officer @SpaceXAI"), was the first to notice the domain name in a post that has since gone viral. Regardless of the intent behind it, the situation is amusing. As for "dots.com," a domain that fits the product name even more directly, it presently belongs to a company that shut down long ago. So if petty revenge really was the goal, snagging that name as well would be taking things to another level.