Classes 9, 42 and 45 in the Dock: What the EUIPO's OPENAI Refusal Means for Every AI Brand

Famous Is Not the Same as Distinctive

There is a temptation in the AI sector to conflate recognition with protection. When a brand name is known to hundreds of millions of people, the instinct is to assume that the law will guard it accordingly. The EU General Court's ruling of 15 July 2026 in OpenAI, Inc. v EUIPO (Case T-555/25) dismantles that assumption with precision.

The Court upheld the European Union Intellectual Property Office's partial refusal to register the word mark OPENAI, covering goods and services across Classes 9, 42 and 45: software and downloadable technology, AI-related services and software as a service, and legal identity-verification services respectively. The refusal was grounded in Article 7(1)(c) of the EU Trade Mark Regulation: descriptiveness. EUIPO had found that 'open', meaning freely accessible, combined with 'AI', meaning artificial intelligence, produces a term the relevant public would read as describing products built on openly accessible artificial intelligence. The General Court agreed the combination was not an unusual linguistic construction in English.

OpenAI had filed the application in June 2023, covering Classes 9, 38, 42 and 45. An examiner partially refused it in December 2024; the EUIPO Fifth Board of Appeal dismissed the company's administrative appeal in June 2025; the General Court has now confirmed that refusal on inherent-descriptiveness grounds.

What the Ruling Preserves and What It Does Not

The judgment is not a total loss. OpenAI's figurative mark, the logo incorporating the word, is registered as an EU trade mark. The word mark refusal is also not final in an absolute sense: the Court left open a separate acquired-distinctiveness route under Article 7(3). To succeed there, OpenAI would need to produce evidence that consumers across the EU associate OPENAI with one specific commercial source, despite the term's descriptive meaning. That process depends on consumer-recognition evidence rather than corporate fame or foreign registrations. The company had cited trademark registrations in more than 30 countries, including the United Kingdom and Singapore; the Court rejected that argument.

The brand survives in logo form. The word, standing alone, cannot monopolise the Class 9, 42 and 45 territory it sought.

Why This Matters Beyond One Company

The ruling arrives at a pointed moment for the sector. Clarivate's Trademark Filing Trends Report 2026 observed that despite rapid commercial influence, most major AI companies did not feature among the highest trademark filers, suggesting brand formalisation in the AI sector is still emerging. That gap has become markedly more expensive to close, in both money and strategic attention.

The timing compounds the pressure. The 2026 edition of the EUIPO Guidelines entered into force on 1 July 2026, tightening the requirement for precision and clarity in mark specifications. Separately, the 13th Edition of the WIPO Nice Classification, in force since 1 January 2026, formally added 'artificial intelligence as a service (AIaaS)' as a distinct entry in Class 42 and brought significant reclassifications affecting Class 9. The signal from both offices is consistent: vagueness is no longer workable, whether in a goods specification or in the mark itself.

In the UK, the UKIPO is set to begin an overhaul of its trademark filing and search systems from September, explicitly targeting the growing volume of AI-related non-traditional filings. Fees rose by roughly 25% from 1 April 2026, the first increase for trade marks since 1998. Filing costs are rising; the bar for what the offices will protect is rising with them.

The Filing Gap Is Structural, Not Accidental

Proprietary data from AI Business Dispatch's analysis of Companies House and IPO records reinforces the picture. Class 9 UK trademark filings reached 2,751 in 2026-Q3, a fall of 71% against the prior period, even as 150 new SIC 69.10 legal-activities companies were incorporated in the same quarter. Perhaps most striking: 99.4% of active SIC 69.10 companies hold no Class 9 trademark at all. Legal-sector businesses, many of which are integrating AI tools directly into client-facing services, are overwhelmingly unprotected at the register level. (AI Business Dispatch analysis of Companies House and IPO data, as of 2026-07.)

Class 9 covers software, downloadable applications, machine-learning instruments and AI-enabled devices. Class 42 now explicitly includes AIaaS. Any firm whose brand name incorporates 'AI', 'Open', 'Smart', 'Auto' or similar descriptors faces exposure of exactly the kind OpenAI has just encountered, only without the resources to pursue an acquired-distinctiveness appeal across 27 member states.

What Happened to 'OPENAI' Can Happen to Your Brand

The OPENAI judgment is, in one sense, narrow: it binds a single application for a single word mark. Its logic, however, is broad. Any AI brand name built from components the relevant public might decode as descriptive of the product category, whether open, smart, deep, auto, cognitive, neural or predictive, is vulnerable to the same analysis before EUIPO and, given the parallel UK legal framework, before UKIPO too. The Court noted explicitly that the combination of 'open' and 'AI' was not an unusual linguistic construction. Examiners at both offices will read that and apply it.

There is still a route forward for OpenAI: acquired distinctiveness through use. But that path is long, expensive and jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction.

One Action This Week

If your brand name contains any component that could be read as describing an AI product or service in English, French, German or Spanish, the main languages tested at EUIPO, run a distinctiveness audit before your next filing window. Check your Class 9 and Class 42 specifications against the 13th Edition Nice Classification now in force, and review whether your mark's wording is protecting what you actually do or simply describing it. TrademarkDashboard (trademarkdashboard.com) provides free UK register search by Nice class; consult a qualified trade mark attorney for EUIPO clearance strategy.