OpenAI has a branding problem

OpenAI has a branding problem

by Jordan Fulghum, June 2026

The company that led the consumer AI race might be losing the naming one.

ChatGPT is a phenomenon. The fastest growing product in history. A research demo that caught the world on fire.

That kind of moment is a blessing, obviously, but it came with a cost. “ChatGPT” is a bad name that stuck. Most everyone agrees with this.

Enter Codex

About a year ago, OpenAI released an agentic coding CLI named Codex. Then, they released a cloud-based coding agent named Codex. Along the way, they released several models named Codex. The name Codex is genuinely good. It sounds like it belongs next to Atlas and Gemini in the pantheon of serious AI product names. Ancient, authoritative.

The problem is that it's a great name — for a coding tool. Yet OpenAI appears to have larger ambitions: rumors are swirling that the team is cooking up a super app, one unified environment for knowledge work that would sit alongside or eventually absorb everything else. In parallel, they continue adding support for non-technical tasks within Codex. So now you have the Codex CLI, the Codex cloud agent, the ChatGPT desktop app, the ChatGPT web app, and a super app presumably on the way. Each one made sense when it shipped. Together, they don't add up to anything a normie can hold in their head.

What Anthropic got right

Anthropic has done something unglamorous and underrated: they put everything under Claude and kept it there.

Claude is not a thrilling name. It doesn't have the mythological weight of Gemini. But it's one name. Claude chat. Claude Code. Claude Co-work. Claude desktop. Claude for enterprise. The product surface is expanding fast and, despite a bit of a clumsy UI for switching between those modes, it's mostly holding together.

There's one place to go and one name to remember. I think that consistency is probably, anecdotally, worth a lot, especially when selling to organizations. “We're standardizing on Claude” is a sentence a CTO can say without a glossary. As someone who is helping roll out this technology at various enterprises, I can tell you this message is way clearer.

Three bets

The way I see it, OpenAI has three options.

A new name. Retire ChatGPT. Build everything under something new that isn't anchored to chat or code. Hardest path. You're giving up one of the most recognized product names in the world. But it's the cleanest.

Codex swallows everything. Merge chat and the super app under Codex and reposition it away from its coding connotation. It seems like OpenAI is already moving in this direction, with their recent report on the future of knowledge work via Codex, for example: Codex for knowledge work.

Stasis. Keep as is. The fragmentation worsens. Enterprise buyers have to map multiple product names to what is essentially one thing. Things erode through friction and confusion.

The default is where most companies end up. It's also a slow leak.

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