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Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

The argument doesn't hinge on whether OpenAI is actually open. Rather it seems to have to do with the name being insufficiently distinguishable from a generic term ("open AI"). I think it's a bizarre ruling given that everyone already knows what OpenAI is.

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Everyone on HN knows what OpenAI is, but there are tons of people who use ChatGPT and either don’t know OpenAI or don’t know the distinction between OpenAI (the company) and OpenAI (the conjunction of two words)

I literally had a non technical family member ask me last week about “AI”.

He began the conversation by saying: “so as far as I know there’s two kinds of ai, open ai and closed ai…”

This speaks to your point, the people are confused.

I mean, he's not wrong! As long as you use lowercase letters for "open", of course

I mentioned this thread to my wife, and she told me that I was the only person she had ever heard mention the name "OpenAI", and she wouldn't have any clue who they were if she saw their name somewhere if I hadn't told her in the past.

The linguistic gymnastics required when talking about OpenAI vs ChatGPT and Anthropic vs Claude is difficult when you're giving talk about them. At least Google vs Gemini is a little clearer.

I mean, I get the rationale Company vs. Product, but most people know the product. As in "I used ChatGPT". But if you ask who OpenAI is, they'll have no clue.

ChatGPT is in someways nicer... because their models are GPT-5.3, GPT-5.4, etc...

But when you're trying to explain that the Anthropic models are called "Opus" or "Sonnet" or "Haiku" or "Fable", but you use them in "Claude", it gets confusing quickly.

> But when you're trying to explain that the Anthropic models are called "Opus" or "Sonnet" or "Haiku" or "Fable", but you use them in "Claude", it gets confusing quickly.

"Why is your French coworker helping you write literature? I thought you worked in software"

In the EU "well known marks" are protected even without registration, and block conflicting trademark applications

As such "everyone knows them" isn't a reason to allow a registration. It would just mean that blocking the trademark has no practical effect

If the goal of a trademark is to get recognized then its futile given OpenAI is already popular. If the goal is to prevent others from using the term which is so generic then it does makes sense to not allow the common keywords being hijacked.

On a side note, the AI models from the company are not even open, one can go as far as banning it as inappropriate marketing (Product not matching the description).

I thought the trademark is to prevent costumers from accidentally buying “open AI” from some company other than openAI, while thinking they’re buying from openAI.

Yes, that is what a trademark is for, in general. In this case, the court ruled that the term "open AI" is too generic to qualify for that protection exactly because it is a purely descriptive term that could legitimately refer to any "freely available" model in common parlance.

> everyone already knows what OpenAI is

If it has Open in the name it's something to do with open source and "AI" right? :)

Trademark law isn't about what "everyone already knows". It's about whether a given mark meets the criteria for legal protection in a give context. So if say an foss ML project described what they do as "open AI" the company known as OpenAI would have a right to defend the mark. This is saying they could not.

> So if say an foss ML project described what they do as "open AI" the company known as OpenAI would have a right to defend the mark. This is saying they could not.

Well if that's all that's at stake here, it seems very reasonable.

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