The co -founder and CEO of Operai, Sam Altman, speaks at Snowflake Summit in San Francisco on June 2, 2025.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images News | Getty images
The OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, criticized on Tuesday a lawsuit filed by the IYO hardware startup, which accused his registered trademark company.
Altman said, in response to the demand, that Iyo’s CEO, Jason Rugolo, had been “quite persistent in his efforts” for OpenAi to buy or invest in his company. In a publication about X, Altman wrote that Rugolo is now demanding Openai by the name in a case that described as “silly, disappointing and incorrect.”
The demand, earlier this month, arose from an ad in May, when Operai said he was bringing Apple The designer Jony Ive acquiring his artificial intelligence startup in an agreement valued at approximately $ 6.4 billion. Iyo claimed that Openai, Altman and IVE had involved themselves in an unfair competition and registered trademark infraction and said he is about to lose his identity due to the agreement.
Operai eliminated the blog publication on the agreement of its website, after a judge last week granted IYO’s request from a temporary restriction order to maintain OpenAi and its associates “when using Iyo Mark of the plaintiff, and any confusing brand of the same, even without limitation ‘io'”.
“This page is temporarily low due to a court order after a registered trademark complaint about our use of the name ‘IO’,” says OpenAi in a message that now appears in the link where the publication had been. “We do not agree with the complaint and we are reviewing our options.”
In X, Altman posted Rugolo Electronic Correos screenshots that seeks investment and a transaction that involves Iyo’s intellectual property. Rugolo also wanted Operai to buy Iyo, Altman wrote.
Rugolo did not immediately respond to a request for comments. But in X, he wrote that “there are another 675 two names of letters that can choose that they are not ours.”
Iyo demand is among several legal challenges that Openai face, which is working to evolve its organizational structure to assume more capital as it builds its AI models. Operai will also face New York Times in a case of copyright violation, and separately against Elon Musk, who had helped start OpenAi as a non -profit organization in 2015 and is now demanding for breach of contract.
Iyo is accepting early orders for his portable device Iyo One In-Ear that contains 16 microphones. He has not published details about IO product plans, but Altman told the Wall Street Journal that IO’s inaugural device is not a smartphone.
Altman wrote in another publication on Tuesday that he wishes Iyo’s team “the best construction products” and that “the world certainly needs more of that and less demands.”
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