An EU Court Just Told OpenAI It Can’t Own Its Own Name. The U.S. Register Says the Same Thing.

An EU court ruled this month that OpenAI cannot register OPENAI as a trademark. The reason given: the name describes what the company does too plainly to work as a brand.

That is a striking thing to happen to the most recognized name in technology. It is also not the first time. Look at the U.S. register and the same problem is sitting there, unresolved, in three separate places — and one detail nobody has reported.

A bank owned OPENAI before OpenAI did.

In April 2013 — two and a half years before OpenAI was founded — Citigroup filed to register OPENAI for financial services. It registered in January 2014, and Citigroup held it until 2020, when it lapsed for the most ordinary reason on the register: nobody filed the paperwork proving the name was still in use.

Meanwhile the company everyone calls OpenAI has been trying to register its own name in the U.S. since 2016 and still hasn't finished. Its flagship application has been frozen — not examined, not refused, suspended — since September 29, 2023. That is 1,032 days of waiting.

This is not bad luck, and the EU ruling is the tell. It is what happens when your company name describes what your company does, and it is happening to nearly every AI startup at once.

Suspended is not the same as pending

Founders read "pending" as "in line." The register has three very different states hiding under that word.

An application can be under examination, which means a reviewer is working through it. It can be refused, which means there is a problem you must answer. Or it can be suspended — frozen behind something outside your control, usually an earlier-filed application that would block yours if it registers. You are not in line. You are waiting for someone else's paperwork to resolve, and there is no clock on it.

OpenAI's three core applications for its own name are all suspended right now. So are the four applications filed by the rival company it fought in federal court. Everybody in that fight is frozen, and winning a lawsuit didn't thaw it — a federal judge can cancel a rival's registration, but only the trademark office decides what registers.

The trap: the "AI" in your name is the part you can't own

Here is the pattern underneath OpenAI's particular mess.

Trademark law won't let you own a word that simply describes what you sell. Call your bakery BREAD and the office will refuse you, because your competitors need that word too. There's a consolation prize for names in that territory — the Supplemental Register, a second-tier list for marks that aren't distinctive enough for the main register. It gets you a certificate and a ® symbol. It does not get you the presumptions of ownership that make a trademark worth enforcing.

Now count who ends up there.

Across every mark filed between 2015 and 2025 that reached registration, 3.3% landed on the Supplemental Register. Among marks with AI in the name, it's 16.5% — five times the rate. Strip out one prolific filer who single-handedly registered a run of state-name-plus-AI marks, and it's still about 14.6%, more than four times normal.

The gap has been widening. In 2018 AI names were roughly 3.6 times more likely to land there. By 2025 they were nearly seven times more likely.

And AI names don't just get downgraded more often — they die more often. Of applications filed 2019 through 2022, old enough to have resolved, 47.7% of AI-named marks reached registration versus 60.5% of everything else. A thirteen-point penalty for a two-letter fashion.

It isn't a small-company problem

The reflex is to assume this happens to startups who couldn't afford good counsel. The register says otherwise.

Apple's XNOR.AI sat on the Supplemental Register until it was cancelled in June 2026. Google owns AI HYPERCOMPUTER. Also Supplemental. Samsung's AI PURIFY, AI HUB, and AI PRO COOKING are there. So are LG's AI WASH and AI NIGHT MODE.

These are companies with the best trademark lawyers money can buy, and they still couldn't get the main register for a name built around AI. Almost none of them chose it, either: the overwhelming majority of Supplemental registrations arrive by amendment, meaning the applicant asked for the real thing, got refused as too descriptive, and accepted the downgrade to salvage something.

That is the actual sequence. Not a filing choice — a concession.

What the consolation prize actually buys

A Supplemental registration is not nothing. It keeps a name on the books, it blocks later identical filings from sailing through, and it can mature into something stronger if the brand becomes famous enough that consumers hear it as a name rather than a description.

But look at how rarely it functions as a weapon. Of the oppositions filed since 2015 where a challenger relied on a registered mark, only about 1.7% leaned on a Supplemental registration — roughly half the rate you'd expect from its share of the register. Owners hold these certificates. They mostly don't fight with them.

The rival in OpenAI's federal case is the cleanest illustration. Its OPEN AI registration was a Supplemental one, granted in 2017 after the office pulled the mark from the main register. That weaker registration still survived for years, still cleared its maintenance check in 2023, and still had to be killed in federal court on fraud grounds rather than at the trademark office. Weak is not the same as harmless — to the company on the wrong end of it, a Supplemental registration was a six-year obstacle.

What a founder should take from this

The filings keep coming anyway. In 2015 there were 55 applications with AI in the name. In 2025 there were 3,783 — a sixty-nine-fold increase, with another 2,474 filed in just the first seven months of 2026.

Most of those founders believe they are naming a company. What they are often doing is naming a category, and the government does not hand out categories.

Three things follow from the data.

Put the ownable part somewhere else. If your name is DESCRIPTOR + AI, the descriptor is doing no work and the AI is doing negative work. The distinctive element has to be a word nobody else needs — a coined term, an unexpected pairing, something arbitrary. That's the part a trademark can actually protect.

Learn what "suspended" means before you celebrate a filing. A filed application is a reservation, not a right. Ask specifically whether anything is sitting ahead of you in the same lane, because that's the difference between a nine-month wait and OpenAI's thousand-day freeze.

Watch the maintenance calendar. Citigroup owned OPENAI outright and lost it — not to a competitor, not to a lawsuit, but to an unfiled form. The register is full of valuable names that died of clerical silence, and it is the single most preventable way to lose a brand.

This analysis is based on public USPTO records and is not legal advice. Cohort definitions: "AI-named" marks are those with AI as a standalone word in the mark text; registration and Supplemental Register rates are drawn from applications filed 2015–2025 in the USPTO's published register data, with outcome rates measured on the matured 2019–2022 cohort.