Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? (2025)

410 points by miniBill 11 hours ago on hackernews | 138 comments

Mistletoe | 11 hours ago

Form follows function but really it’s just probably modeled on the founders.

Kudos to DeepSeek and Midjourney for doing something different.

Avicebron | 10 hours ago

DeepSeek has the best logo.

farfatched | 11 hours ago

AI plop.

mtct88 | 11 hours ago

Never thought about it.

But now I can't unsee it.

designerarvid | 11 hours ago

They’re apertures; symbolically things emerge from them.

“…but that’s really all a butthole is, an aperture” - Louis CK

eranation | 11 hours ago

Aperture Science

We do what we must because we can For the good of all of us, except the ones who are dead

inigyou | 10 hours ago

We doodoo what we must.

Sharlin | 10 hours ago

This explains so much.

derektank | 10 hours ago

Claude’s logo is closer to a dandelion than an aperture (though closer to a butthole than either)

estearum | 10 hours ago

No, they're definitely the reverse. They're "the singularity." Most obviously clear in Grok's which is a literal pictogram of a black hole. But these are entities that suck things up, not produce things.

The mental model of the superintelligence, to a true believer, is much more like a thing that consumes our world (hopefully for the better) rather than a thing that exists within the world and "produces stuff" in it.

robotbikes | 10 hours ago

Perfect analogy for AI actually a reverse butt-hole that sucks up the internet like a blackhole and then you go to it and it shits out as much of an answer as you are willing to feed it by massaging it with electrical stimulation. And now our digital world is being contaminated with all of this digital fecal matter further hastening the enshittingulatity.

elthor89 | 11 hours ago

Thank you. I once asked Claude the same. It reminded me of the flag from the tv show community

LtWorf | 9 hours ago

E pluribus anum

wartywhoa23 | 6 hours ago

Fits great for companies whose business is devouring everything in sight, digesting it, and selling the end result to end users.
What is seen, cannot be unseen

_jsdp | 11 hours ago

Reminded me of Gavin Belson Signature from Silicon Valley :-D

keyle | 10 hours ago

A brilliantly designed horizontal logo to fit on server racks!

levzettelin | 10 hours ago

"I like it! It's bold!" lolol

Alien1Being | 11 hours ago

Perhaps to symbolise the quality of the material they extrude...

Slop rhymes with plop.

VladVladikoff | 11 hours ago

>Then came the redesign: a perfect circle with a subtle gradient and central void.

I don’t see the gradient, their logo is black and white. Where’s the gradient? Was this written by an AI hallucinating?

airstrike | 11 hours ago

Ironically, yes.
You're right, there's no gradient.

Sankozi | 10 hours ago

Lines are getting thinner closer to the center. This is not a gradient, but I understand what they meant. AI would use correct word for this.

yorwba | 10 hours ago

OpenAI's own logo description was also written by you-know who: https://openai.com/brand/ The part I find funny is "right angles introduce the precision and structure that technology demands" while the logo is hexagonal and has no right angles at all. Precision and structure not included!

bob778 | 10 hours ago

I’m convinced this is a joke by Ives cause there’s no way he’d approve that description without checking it had 90 degrees

tokai | 8 hours ago

Why not, he's a thieving idiot.

lpapez | 10 hours ago

You are absolutely right! It was an honest mistake on my part. The absence of colour is the smoking gun.

feverzsj | 11 hours ago

That's the universal symbol of enshittification.

frays | 11 hours ago

> Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?

What did AI say when you asked it? I got a slightly funny but reassuring answer.

stared | 10 hours ago

In a similar vein, some time ago I got curious why the Grafana logo looks like the Zerg emblem see https://www.reddit.com/r/grafana/comments/1o79zxy/grafana_lo....

vb-8448 | 10 hours ago

I guess it has to do with the fact that everything is greyscale nowadays ... did you notice there are no more coloured cars, and the few that are there are all faded.

HPsquared | 10 hours ago

I think because people are visually overstimulated from all the content in their phones, they prefer plain minimal design in the physical world.

LtWorf | 9 hours ago

It's not about what people want, it's about what designers all sheepishly follow.

dnemmers | 10 hours ago

I'm guessing limited car colors benefits the manufacturers more so than the customer. Less choice means less cost. Additionally, by avoiding 'polarizing' colors, they likely won't have issues with unsellable stock.

HPsquared | 8 hours ago

Can also be a side effect of cars being so expensive, people want to minimise depreciation so choose conservative colours.

zapkyeskrill | 10 hours ago

It's good that it (they?) identified the smoking gun, and a fact that changed everything

stared | 10 hours ago

I am almost certain it is star or spark.

But again, if someone is looking for assholes, they will find them.

inigyou | 10 hours ago

Reminds me of the Telecom New Zealand rebranding. The old logo: the word Telecom, with lines through the "o" reminiscent of wires passing through a loading coil. The old name: Telecom (obviously) as in telecommunications. Conveys: We do phones. We do wires. We do long distance talking.

The new logo: basically identical to Claude's current one but blue. The new name: Spark. Conveys: absolutely nothing, the blank slate business, our executives don't actually know what we do.

dingdingdang | 8 hours ago

>> The new logo: basically identical to Claude's current one but blue. The new name: Spark. Conveys: absolutely nothing, the blank slate business, our executives don't actually know what we do.

This is my experience as well, people drawn to leadership in our present time often have absolutely no idea about anything except the -idea- of business. Which of course makes things vaguely "professional" seeming while they effectively destroy businesses/organisations.

drstewart | 10 hours ago

Why'd Bill Gates name his company after his thing?

minikomi | 10 hours ago

Does the openai logo look like that because .. OpenAI? Then others followed suit?

ReptileMan | 10 hours ago

Because they are ran by assholes?

mianos | 10 hours ago

Same, I often wondered why the openai logo looks like an interpretation of goatse.

penteract | 10 hours ago

This brought to my attention the following claim by OpenAI, regarding a logo which does not have any right angles:

> right angles introduce the precision and structure that technology demands

https://openai.com/brand/#:~:text=right%20angles

shakna | 10 hours ago

> Our primary wordmark requires prescribed clear space and should NOT be used with the Blossom.

Ironic missing space right there...

Leonard_of_Q | 10 hours ago

A man goes to a psychiatrist. To start things off, the psychiatrist suggests they start with a Rorschach Test. He holds up the first picture and asks the man what he sees.

"A man and a woman making love in a park," the man replies.

The psychiatrist holds up the second picture and asks the man what he sees.

"A man and a woman making love in a boat."

He holds up the third picture.

"A man and a woman making love at the beach."

This goes on for the rest of the set of pictures; the man says he sees a man and a woman making love in every one of the pictures. At the end of the test, the psychiatrist looks over his notes and says, "It looks like you have a preoccupation with sex."

And the man replies, "Well, you're the one with the dirty pictures."

adonovan | 10 hours ago

This trend is far older than the AI era. The British magazine Private eye for many years in the 1990s had a running joke in which each issue displayed the new logos of old companies that had spent a fortune on rebranding. All of them were variations on circles.

Naomi Klein in her book No Logo interprets it as a form of abstraction away from the passé and less profitable business of whatever concrete task those industries used to do, and towards outsourcing, branding, and financialization as an end in itself.

adam_patarino | 10 hours ago

When we started work on our logo for Rig I literally told our design agency we cant do butt holes

jdw64 | 10 hours ago

I also wrote about this before[1], and I think it's because the design itself ultimately targets specific consumers.

[1]https://www.makonea.com/en-US/casual/programmers-sell-ox-not...

SkyMarshal | 10 hours ago

Claude is the only one that looks like an asshole. The rest are just circular, or not even that. Does every circle in the world look like an asshole? Car wheels? Pizzas? Camera Lenses? Ferris wheels? This is like a Rorschach test.

mirekrusin | 10 hours ago

OpenAI is more... open. Maybe that's what they wanted to communicate.

lo_zamoyski | 10 hours ago

A good question to pose to Sam.

isodev | 9 hours ago

Or perhaps the logo is a depiction of us, the little "products" running around burning and paying for tokens... we're certainly more receptive after a few months of subscription softening-up.

gumby | 8 hours ago

They should have chosen the domain goatse.ai

chungusamongus | 10 hours ago

Buttholes occur in nature all the time

subscribed | 9 hours ago

If I not misheard (I don't know, just remember it), even the fetus development basically starts from the butthole.

chungusamongus | 9 hours ago

That's beautiful

throwaway173738 | 9 hours ago

I read somewhere that the first invertebrate animal ate and excreted through the same butthole-shaped oriface.

rsa4046 | 8 hours ago

Some still do: it's called a gastrovascular cavity, and is present in marine invertebrates such as Cnidaria (jellyfish, coral polyps, anemones), Ctenophores (comb jellies); Platyhelminthes (flatworms, tapeworms).

woadwarrior01 | 4 hours ago

Yeah, I learnt about this from the amazing Max Bennett book: A brief history of intelligence.

tremon | 7 hours ago

The embryo, not the fetus. Pretty sure that's referring to gastrulation, where the cell blob splits into multiple layers to start cell specialization; it does this by curving in on itself, and the cavity formed by this process becomes the intestinal tract: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastrulation#Protostomes_versu...

However, that all happens at the embryonic stage (around day 9). At the point where the embryo has advanced sufficiently to be called a fetus (around week 9), the body has already sufficiently developed so that it's impossible to say where "fetal development" starts: https://embryology.med.unsw.edu.au/embryology/index.php?titl...

warumdarum | 8 hours ago

I wouldn't give much on the opinion of a topological donut. I should know, I'm one

redanddead | 8 hours ago

Evolutionary it’s one of the first things to develop, see coleopteres

Millions of species are just tubes

wartywhoa23 | 6 hours ago

Further generalized as tori in terms of topology, and humans are no exception.
And if I had to choose, I would say that the Claude logo is probably the most distinct / imaginative out of the ones listed.

elictronic | 9 hours ago

I didn’t realize Claude owned half of the companies.
Yes, a lot of commenters here (and the author) outing themselves.

amanaplanacanal | 8 hours ago

Connoisseurs of fine buttholes.

anal_reactor | 8 hours ago

It's less about how most of them look like different stages of fisting party, and more about the fact that they have zero distinctive elements. Despite the amount of ads being shoved down my asshole, I still find it difficult to recognize different brands. Meta and Gemini being the worst offenders, if you show me these two logos in a week and ask what they are, I'd have zero clue they're even company logos. This is the level of failure we're talking about.

I think this is peak millennialism because the design is supposed to be as inoffensive as possible and therefore shows absolutely nothing.

mondobe | 8 hours ago

I'll trust you on this subject, anal_reactor

throx21pizza | 8 hours ago

Great... now every time I look at a fresh pizza in the delivery box, cross-cut into 8 slices, I will think of Vonnegut's drawing and buttholes. Thanks a lot, SkyMarshal, for putting this association in my head!!

sapphirelimetea | 8 hours ago

> Ferris wheels?

Yes because the spokes are the lines that go to the center

> Camera [apertures]?

100% - they even "wink"

> Does every circle in the world look like an asshole?

Well every asshole is circular and every person has an asshole so we are biased toward seeing them everywhere. Any prominently placed circle will always trigger an evolutionary reaction. Do I:

A) Sniff it

B) Hump it

C) Bite it

D) Vibe code slop with it?

Why do you think so many squares work in tech? It's because they don't hire assholes (circles)

redanddead | 8 hours ago

Bite is always the answer

jambalaya8 | 8 hours ago

All due respect, but is anyone's asshole actually circular? Asking as most asshole seem to me to be squished closed and more starry-slat-like. Functionally speaking a circular asshole would be terrible; sphincters are important.

The logos do look too canonically similar in general, though. :(

redanddead | 8 hours ago

Claude is the worst offender

GPT is kinda Celtic

None of the Chinese labs have this buttholeness

dd8601fn | 6 hours ago

OpenAIs annoys me. In the “can’t be unseen” way.

The lines don’t actually work. Like they asked their bot to make a solomons knot style logo and it flubbed it.

But apparently it was good enough for purpose.

rglover | 7 hours ago

> Does every circle in the world look like an asshole?

One man's trash...

srcoder | an hour ago

One is still fresh, the other ones trashed

BatteryMountain | 10 hours ago

What if, your brain is over-sexualized and you are obsessed with butthole, to the point your mind associate almost all round objects/shapes with buttholes? Maybe the logo's aren't the problem but rather degeneracy stuck in the brain. Now, think of a doughnut. Disgusting. :p

andrewstuart | 10 hours ago

If I start an ai company I guarantee I will get a butthole logo and it will be animated.

pharrington | 10 hours ago

This blogger's gonna go nuts when they learn about the ouroboros.

dudul | 10 hours ago

The logo for the Brazilian Institute of Oriental Studies is a masterpiece :-)

MeteorMarc | 10 hours ago

My son remarked: because they produce shit.

genepope | 10 hours ago

A butthole and a drain hole. Sounds like they are spot on. Give it to society in the butt and drain all societie's resources

sparsesignal | 10 hours ago

Have you tried clicking the Claude logo? https://x.com/ertug/status/2072339797708849398
This seems to no longer work, or at least, I clicked over 100 times and didn't get anything.

sparsesignal | 10 hours ago

It's still working for me, but only on the web (desktop) interface.

lilbigdoot | 9 hours ago

That actually made me cackle ty

amarant | 8 hours ago

Wow the animation makes it really look like an asshole!

magneticnorth | 8 hours ago

https://xcancel.com/ertug/status/2072339797708849398

to see it if you aren't logged in to x

lemagedurage | 8 hours ago

Sometimes it feels like we're living in an episode of Silicon Valley, the show.
I'm gonna choose to believe they all involved AI in the design process and AI has a cheeky fetish for humiliating humans.

estetlinus | 10 hours ago

It the synthetic IQ goatse

yen223 | 10 hours ago

It's because OpenAI starts with an O, and an O looks like a butthole?

j3th9n | 10 hours ago

Because life in the womb starts at the butthole.

ks2048 | 10 hours ago

Walmart Logo

seydor | 10 hours ago

More like design by iPhone. They keep making the corners rounder and rounder, so the only way to be safe is a round logo.

Of course this is a uniquely american problem. The world uses android

imhoguy | 10 hours ago

Yeah, after recent Samsung One UI and Google icons change...hm.

whycome | 10 hours ago

The flag of India gives me that vibe.

saltdoo | 10 hours ago

Something about Claude logo looking like Kurt Vonnegut's drawing in Breakfast of Champions always made me hesitant to use Claude.

dingdingdang | 10 hours ago

Talking about bad design what on earth is going on with Amazon's new fav-icon, it's the same reddish-orange as Alibaba and Aliexpress and looks utterly unremarkable.

throw83939r0r | 10 hours ago

Maybe author watched too many dog videos? Every dog face looks like anus, it can defecate and lick in both direction. Once you go dog, entire world is your a toliet and every thing turns into buthole!

Dead bird on road? Better lick it, not to miss its cloaka!

lo_zamoyski | 10 hours ago

Interesting Rorschach test.

HPsquared | 10 hours ago

Their product is a result of digestion.

nelox | 10 hours ago

Once seen, it cannot be unseen. Thanks.

code_duck | 10 hours ago

The OpenAI logo and “swirling hexagon” in general is reminiscent of the old logo of SNET (Southern New England Telephone), except it’s a pentagon. I used to draw this on my book covers at school to make life feel more engaging.

https://logodix.com/logo/1065826.jpg

wartywhoa23 | 6 hours ago

S-net. This thread got hairy real quick.

paulnpace | 10 hours ago

Are people who use lots of AIs butthole surfers?

lucasfcosta | 10 hours ago

Fantastic article. It started like a joke but then added some pretty interesting notes (still using a funny tone).

thinkthatover | 10 hours ago

imo: sub-conscious messaging to get you used to looking at a loading screen for a large portion of your workday

ozgung | 10 hours ago

Before all of these AIs, HAL 9000 was designed as a shiny asshole with a glowing red light at its center. He was also a real asshole.

Arun2009 | 9 hours ago

Jung might have seen a relation to circular maNDalas, which as per him were apparently everywhere: https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=circular+mandala

IIRC, circular maNDalas as per Jung draw your attention towards its center, which is the most important part of the maNDala. For Jung, the circular maNDala represented the self - the totality of the psyche - with the center representing its organizing principle. I've noticed how this pattern naturally arises in circular flowers, with the petals serving to draw the bee in to the center where the reproductive structures and nectar are located.

I realize that I am not really helping matters much, but thought would mention this anyway.

classified | 9 hours ago

Did they make you sign an NDa for your spelling of mandala?

Arun2009 | 9 hours ago

driverdan | 9 hours ago

Thanks for sharing, I'm not sure how I've never heard of this before.

classified | 4 hours ago

TIL! The "NDa" is one of the "Prenasalized consonants".

wartywhoa23 | 6 hours ago

It's just that the center is Non-Disclosable.

hmstx | 9 hours ago

"Why so many brands change their logos and look like everybody else".

In the past year(s) I have noticed a few icons in my Android phone turning into the same thing.

For a long time there was Uber, white on black. And then others thought white on black was the cool thing to join in on, making the reduced icons of the following look the same : Uber, Soundcloud (they kept their sigil at least), Swile, Qobuz, myNoise. I'm sure if I installed more junk I'd have seen more.

Even myNoise who goes against tech grain! To their credit, they added an orange circle background to it sometime this spring. Soundcloud execs woke up and went back to their trademark orange. But, heck.

lofaszvanitt | 9 hours ago

Someone watching too much porn :D.
Circle is the perfect shape. Take a rock, throw it in a water, you get circular ripple. Throw a brick, circular ripple. Throw a bicycle, circular ripple.

hdgvhicv | 8 hours ago

Hexagons are a far better shape.

voxleone | 7 hours ago

Circles are aristocracy in Flatland[0]. In advertising[1], they reign no less supreme.

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45506 [1] https://inkbotdesign.com/circle-logos/

felooboolooomba | 8 hours ago

I have a dirty mind, but I don't agree that all of them look like that. Claude is definitely looks like an external rectal sphincter. Grok is a ring that men have used for erectile dysfunction.

pikuseru | 8 hours ago

If your butthole looks like Copilot I recommend you have a trip to the doctors for a check up

ionwake | 8 hours ago

Ill be honest I wasnt expecting this to be on point

wartywhoa23 | 8 hours ago

This is the worship of the eye of the Horus, of the entity that is both all-seeing and all-engulfing.

Black Sun, Saturn (hexagon in OpenAI logo, anyone?), saturnalias and all the ensuing and tangential cults. The ouroboric cult of Singularity, etc.

The clergy beyond those AI corporations uses those symbols to express the intent for power, total control and surveillance.

The amount of esoteric obsession of those who print and own money to feed the AI beast, is staggering.

To each according to his wits.

someguynamedq | 8 hours ago

Do you know what the ouroboros represents?

wartywhoa23 | 7 hours ago

The ever-failing attempt to attain the ever-eluding meaning that is always beyond all words and other means to express it.

The knowledge that can never be caught into a fixed form. The Mercury of alchemists.

The paradox of "war is peace", "slavery is freedom" and the like, and both the promise to solve it (by striving to close the gap between Ouroboros' mouth and tail), and eternal damnation of the elusive drift of all meanings in its unresolved state.

A certain 3rd entity around which the duality of the visible world evolves and revolves, remaining out of its scope, which is better expressed by the Caduceus.

Also, the attempt to conceal that invisible third hermetically, which always fails without failing, fractally and recursively generating all the spectrum of meanings from this single underlying paradox, the resolution of which was sought after by alchemists in the form of Lapis Philosophorum.

I could go on and on, but this can only be experienced, not expressed.

rayiner | 7 hours ago

We won’t have real AGIs until they can see this kind of pattern in logos.

hnburnsy | 6 hours ago

Openai's logo has always bugged me because it looks like three interlocking chain links that the designer did not align properly.

antaviana | 6 hours ago

At least Grok has the courage to recognize it is a black hole.

fittingopposite | 6 hours ago

That was a good and funny read

br0ceph | 5 hours ago

Is it me, or AI company CEOs' faces, also look like buttholes?

ChrisArchitect | 4 hours ago

Logos reflect the ambient cultural trends. This is the Butthole Age

srcoder | an hour ago

"Shit in, shit out!" Everything makes sense now

wseqyrku | an hour ago

I think it reflects the centralized nature of their services. They can't think out of buttholes.