TradeSun Inc., a Del Mar, California, maker of AI document-processing software, sued OpenAI on Monday, alleging the company took the name of its flagship ASTRA product for GPT-6 Astra, the model OpenAI released last month. The complaint was filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, Bloomberg Law reported.
TradeSun says it has sold software under the Astra name since 2021 and secured a federal trademark registration for AI software services in 2022. Its case rests on reverse confusion: instead of a small company trading on a famous brand, TradeSun argues that OpenAI’s far larger launch is teaching consumers that “Astra means OpenAI.” According to the complaint, customers who encounter TradeSun’s product are now likely to assume it belongs to OpenAI, is built on OpenAI’s model or carries OpenAI’s approval, “or, worse, that TradeSun is the imitator trying to latch onto OpenAI’s Astra brand.”
TradeSun says the two products serve the same customers. It argues OpenAI’s Astra does the same enterprise, financial and compliance work TradeSun has done for years, including reading business documents, extracting and reconciling data, screening for risk and automating multi-step workflows for banks and other enterprises. The company also contends that OpenAI, which registers and enforces its own trademarks, could easily have found the Astra registration.
TradeSun is asking the court to order OpenAI to remove the name from all of its products, to rule that OpenAI infringed the trademark and to award TradeSun the profits OpenAI earned from the use. “Being one of the biggest technology companies in the world does not entitle OpenAI to our trademark,” founder and CEO Nigel Hook said in a statement.
OpenAI rejected the claims. “This complaint lacks any merit whatsoever. We remain focused on responsibly building technology that benefits everyone,” a spokesperson said in an email to Bloomberg Law.
The suit is the latest naming fight OpenAI has faced in the same court. In February, a federal judge barred OpenAI from using “cameo” for features in its now-defunct Sora video generator, a case that remains pending. In April, another judge blocked its “io” branding for AI-powered devices, and that dispute settled in July.
The Astra name has already had a rocky stretch: OpenAI shelved GPT-6.1 Astra last month after internal testing found it fell short of the company’s safety standards. The case is TradeSun Inc. v. OpenAI OpCo LLC, No. 3:26-cv-11360.