OpenAI Won in Court — But Still Doesn't Own Its Own Name on the Register

Here's the fact that didn't make the Bloomberg Law headline: OpenAI has been trying to register "OPENAI" as a trademark since September 2016, and as of today the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO, the federal agency that grants trademarks) shows zero live, completed registrations for the plain word.

Not one.

The company that convinced a federal judge to cancel a rival's trademark and permanently bar its use — per Bloomberg Law's July 22, 2025 report on Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers' summary judgment order (a ruling a judge issues when the facts are clear enough that no trial is needed) — owns a whole stack of "OPENAI" applications that are, without exception, still waiting in line or dead. The court win is real. The picture on the register is a completely different animal, and for anyone watching how the world's most recognizable AI brand actually locked down its name, the gap between the two is the whole story.

Understanding that gap isn't lawyer trivia. Knowing how this system works is a business skill — the kind that keeps a competitor from planting a flag on the name you've spent years and marketing dollars building.

The 2016 application nobody talks about

OpenAI's first attempt at its own name was an application filed September 21, 2016 (serial number 87178985) covering software. It never got close.

The paper trail reads like a cautionary tale for founders who file and forget. The examining attorney — the USPTO reviewer assigned to decide whether a mark can register — sent OpenAI an office action (an official letter raising a problem the applicant must fix) on January 5, 2017. OpenAI never wrote back. On August 3, 2017 the application went abandoned for failure to respond — dead on arrival. No fight, no argument, no amendment. Just silence and abandonment.

That's worth sitting with. In 2016, "OpenAI" was a small research lab, not a household name, and the company apparently didn't think its own trademark was worth the cost of a single reply letter. By the time the brand became shorthand for generative AI, that early filing was long buried.

What "OPENAI" actually looks like on the register today

Fast-forward to the current portfolio. The ownership records show the main operating entity, OpenAI OpCo, LLC, holding 33 marks — split, fittingly, across two different spellings of its own name — while OpenAI, Inc. holds 9 (7 of them live), OpenAI Foundation holds 5, and a single retired OpenAI, L.P. record rounds out the set. The register reflects the company's corporate reshuffling across several different owner names, which by itself creates "who actually owns this?" questions for anyone running a clearance search (the background check you do before adopting a new brand).

The core "OPENAI" word applications tell the real story. There's one filed January 26, 2022 (serial 97238896) covering software and tech services, still waiting in line nearly four years later. Another filed May 24, 2023 (serial 98010861) covering online communication services, also pending. A stylized version filed January 31, 2025 (serial 99025123) across six categories of goods and services, pending. And a fresh word-mark application filed September 29, 2025 (serial 99419660), again across six categories, pending.

Every one of these shows a registration number of none. The 2025 filing sprawls across six trademark classes — the numbered buckets the USPTO uses to sort goods and services — with a description that runs thousands of words: humanoid robots, quantum computing, AR/VR headsets, even employment recruiting. It's an everything-application. And it's brand new, meaning the review has barely begun.

The 2022 application has been in process with a status date of May 29, 2026. Four years of back-and-forth and still no registration certificate. For a mark this famous, that lag is remarkable — and it points straight to the kind of "someone got here first" friction the court case was fighting on a separate front.

The other "Open AI" — and the one that actually registered

The company OpenAI sued, per Bloomberg Law, was Open Artificial Intelligence Inc. and its founder Guy Ravine. The register makes plain why OpenAI had to go to court instead of simply out-filing him.

Ravine's company holds a live registration for "OPEN AI" (with a space), on an application filed December 11, 2015 (serial 86847151, Registration No. 5258002) — before OpenAI's own first application. It registered August 1, 2017, covering "providing a web site featuring technology that enables internet users to share documents, images and videos."

Read that description again. It has nothing to do with AI tools. And the history shows why. The mark was pulled from the main trademark list — the Principal Register, where strong, distinctive brands live — on February 28, 2017, and instead landed on the Supplemental Register on August 1, 2017. The Supplemental Register is a lower tier for marks the USPTO doesn't consider distinctive enough yet to be true brand names; it gives some protection but far weaker rights. In other words, the government never treated "OPEN AI" as a strong brand for those services. It's a concession, not a fortress.

That weaker registration still stayed alive: Ravine's company filed and had accepted a Section 8 declaration on November 13, 2023 — the periodic paperwork that proves you're still using a mark and keeps it from lapsing. So it was live and current when the litigation heated up. Then an attorney formally withdrew from the matter on October 16, 2025, the sort of thing you'd expect when a registrant is winding down after losing. The court, according to Bloomberg Law, found the mark invalid because Ravine "intended to deceive" the USPTO by submitting proof-of-use samples for a product that didn't actually exist when he applied — a fraud-on-the-agency argument, decided in district court rather than inside the USPTO's own tribunal.

There's a newer "Open AI" hopeful in the mix, too. Open Artificial Intelligence Inc. filed four fresh "OPEN AI" applications on October 4, 2023 (serials 98209997, 98210006, 98210010, and 98210091) across communication, education, tech, and legal-services categories — an attempt to push the "Open AI" name into exactly OpenAI's lane. Separately, a company called Auto Investment Enterprises Corp filed for "OPEN AI" on leather goods on August 23, 2024 (serial 98713461).

OpenAI's real brand defense runs through the trademark tribunal, not the courtroom

The headline was a court win. But the register shows OpenAI's everyday brand policing happens at the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board — the USPTO's in-house court, usually called the TTAB, that decides disputes over whether a mark should register. There, three of OpenAI's flagship applications (serials 97238896, 98010861, and 97238902) show up again and again as the foundation for one challenge after another.

The tool OpenAI keeps using is an opposition — a formal objection you file to block someone else's pending trademark before it registers. Six of them in the data lean on those OpenAI applications as the basis:

• One filed January 17, 2024 (proceeding 91289272), where OpenAI teamed up with Ravine's own registration and the four 2023 "Open AI" applications to block a third party's mark. Ended April 2024.
• A companion filed the same day against the same target (proceeding 91289263). Ended April 2024.
• One filed February 10, 2025 (proceeding 91296857) against an applicant called OpentimeAI. Ended May 2025.
• One filed July 7, 2025 (proceeding 91300440) against a mark called "OPEN AI 2 / Open Autonomous Intelligence Initiative." Ended October 2025.
• One filed September 23, 2025 (proceeding 91301881) against Auto Investment's "OPEN AI" bag mark. Still going.
• One filed May 6, 2026 (proceeding 91307135) against a mark called "OPENEDU AI." Still going.

Look closely at that first case from January 2024. OpenAI listed Ravine's own "OPEN AI" registration among the marks it was relying on to block someone else. Meaning at one point the two "Open AI" camps stood side by side as co-challengers against an outsider — before the relationship collapsed into the lawsuit that produced the July 2025 judgment. The register captures that about-face the news coverage skips right over.

Why a founder should care

The lesson here isn't "OpenAI won." It's that a company can dominate a market, win in federal court, and still not hold a finished registration for its core name nearly a decade after first filing. Fame doesn't clear the path. Being first in line does — and OpenAI's own head start was undercut by a 2015 registration it couldn't just wish away.

If you're picking a name for an AI product right now, the "OPEN"-plus-"AI" space is a minefield. The data turns up marks like OPENEVIDENCE, OPENBOOK AI, OPEN BRAIN AI, OPENMATHAI, OPENEDU AI, OPEN POWER AI CONSORTIUM, and dozens more, many filed in the same software and tech categories. OpenAI is actively fighting a share of them. A name that merely gestures at "open" plus "AI" walks straight into a well-funded owner that files objections as a matter of routine and has the budget to escalate.

Two practical moves for anyone protecting a brand. First, when even a famous company's registration status is murky, don't assume the public record matches reality — pull the full history and the tribunal docket before you conclude a name is free to use. Second, watch how ownership is spelled: OpenAI's rights are scattered across OpenAI, Inc., OPENAI OPCO, LLC, OPENAI FOUNDATION, and OpenAI, L.P. A search that checks only one of those names will miss the rest — and a miss like that is how a "clear" name turns into an expensive surprise.

GleanMark's monitoring flags exactly this kind of fragmentation: rights split across affiliated companies, weaker Supplemental-Register status hiding behind a famous name, and the patterns of objections that reveal how aggressively a brand guards its turf. In a naming space as crowded as "OPEN + AI," knowing who pushes back and how often is the difference between a name you can build on and a two-year fight you never budgeted for.

This analysis is based on public USPTO records and is not legal advice.