Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? (2025)
velvetshark.comThis 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.
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.
OpenAI is more... open. Maybe that's what they wanted to communicate.
They should have chosen the domain goatse.ai
A good question to pose to Sam.
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.
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.
I'll trust you on this subject, anal_reactor
It's not millennialism, it's driven by Apple and Google constantly changing the rules around what app icons need to look like. The logos are all just adaptations to app store rules.
1. They have to be square. That immediately eliminates basically all logos that are just the companies name and forces everyone to adopt some sort of symbol.
2. They have to have solid backgrounds and rounded corners.
3. They are supposed to match Apple's theme, whatever it is this year. In practice this means simple solid geometries and not anything too fancy or detailed.
4. They have to be recognizable at a wide range of sizes, including very small.
5. If you want your logo to appear in a notification bar then the rules get even harsher. A tiny square, no detail, and it has to make sense in black and white. Note that the ChatGPT app puts such an icon into the macOS menu bar, so a logo that didn't work in black and white and at tiny sizes would be a problem for them.
When you combine these constraints what you're left with is variants shapes that fill the area inside a square, but which are not themselves square as iOS icons are actually "squircles", which can work in colour or black and white, and which can be recognizable at small sizes. So that's what you get.
The only way out of this boring-ass Sahara Desert of visuals would be for Apple and Google to redesign their operating systems in such a way that icons no longer mattered as much, or could be non-square shaped.
Claude is the worst offender
GPT is kinda Celtic
None of the Chinese labs have this buttholeness
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.
> Does every circle in the world look like an asshole?
One man's trash...
And if I had to choose, I would say that the Claude logo is probably the most distinct / imaginative out of the ones listed.
i remember it's similar to one of the symbols in Vonnegut's books so not entirely original
Buttholes occur in nature all the time
If I not misheard (I don't know, just remember it), even the fetus development basically starts from the butthole.
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...
> (around day 9)
Typo; should be day 17/18.
I read somewhere that the first invertebrate animal ate and excreted through the same butthole-shaped oriface.
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).
Yeah, I learnt about this from the amazing Max Bennett book: A brief history of intelligence.
That's beautiful
Evolutionary it’s one of the first things to develop, see coleopteres
Millions of species are just tubes
Further generalized as tori in terms of topology, and humans are no exception.
I wouldn't give much on the opinion of a topological donut. I should know, I'm one
> 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)
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. :(
Bite is always the answer
Yes, a lot of commenters here (and the author) outing themselves.
Connoisseurs of fine buttholes.
As was often said in my Sculpture program (and more often for other parts of human anatomy) ... 'recurring forms in nature'
I didn’t realize Claude owned half of the companies.
One is still fresh, the other ones trashed
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!!
>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?
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!
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
Why not, he's a thieving idiot.
You are absolutely right! It was an honest mistake on my part. The absence of colour is the smoking gun.
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.
You're right, there's no gradient.
Ironically, yes.
They’re apertures; symbolically things emerge from them.
“…but that’s really all a butthole is, an aperture” - Louis CK
Aperture Science
We do what we must because we can For the good of all of us, except the ones who are dead
This explains so much.
We doodoo what we must.
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.
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.
Claude’s logo is closer to a dandelion than an aperture (though closer to a butthole than either)
Have you tried clicking the Claude logo? https://x.com/ertug/status/2072339797708849398
Wow the animation makes it really look like an asshole!
https://xcancel.com/ertug/status/2072339797708849398
to see it if you aren't logged in to x
That actually made me cackle ty
This seems to no longer work, or at least, I clicked over 100 times and didn't get anything.
It's still working for me, but only on the web (desktop) interface.
Sometimes it feels like we're living in an episode of Silicon Valley, the show.
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
> Our primary wordmark requires prescribed clear space and should NOT be used with the Blossom.
Ironic missing space right there...
Something about Claude logo looking like Kurt Vonnegut's drawing in Breakfast of Champions always made me hesitant to use Claude.
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
Yeah, after recent Samsung One UI and Google icons change...hm.
Form follows function but really it’s just probably modeled on the founders.
Kudos to DeepSeek and Midjourney for doing something different.
DeepSeek has the best logo.
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....
"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.
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.
I'm gonna choose to believe they all involved AI in the design process and AI has a cheeky fetish for humiliating humans.
Never thought about it.
But now I can't unsee it.
Thank you. I once asked Claude the same. It reminded me of the flag from the tv show community
E pluribus anum
Fits great for companies whose business is devouring everything in sight, digesting it, and selling the end result to end users.
Openai's logo has always bugged me because it looks like three interlocking chain links that the designer did not align properly.
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.
S-net. This thread got hairy real quick.
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.
Did they make you sign an NDa for your spelling of mandala?
Thanks for sharing, I'm not sure how I've never heard of this before.
TIL! The "NDa" is one of the "Prenasalized consonants".
It's just that the center is Non-Disclosable.
I am almost certain it is star or spark.
But again, if someone is looking for assholes, they will find them.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
The cars are primarily an efficiency thing; it's more efficient to just make a few colours. The requirement for those colours to be boring _may_ be coming to an end, though; see the Renault 5. It only comes in five colours, but two of those are yellow and green. Anecdotally, pretty much every Renault 5 I see around is yellow or green, so apparently people like it.
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.
Can also be a side effect of cars being so expensive, people want to minimise depreciation so choose conservative colours.
I think because people are visually overstimulated from all the content in their phones, they prefer plain minimal design in the physical world.
It's not about what people want, it's about what designers all sheepishly follow.
Because they are ran by assholes?
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
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...
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."
> Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?
What did AI say when you asked it? I got a slightly funny but reassuring answer.
Once seen, it cannot be unseen. Thanks.
The flag of India gives me that vibe.
When we started work on our logo for Rig I literally told our design agency we cant do butt holes
The logo for the Brazilian Institute of Oriental Studies is a masterpiece :-)
This blogger's gonna go nuts when they learn about the ouroboros.
At least Grok has the courage to recognize it is a black hole.
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.
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/
Hexagons are a far better shape.
(2025)
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43649640
Fantastic article. It started like a joke but then added some pretty interesting notes (still using a funny tone).
I think it reflects the centralized nature of their services. They can't think out of buttholes.
Their product is a result of digestion.
If your butthole looks like Copilot I recommend you have a trip to the doctors for a check up
It's good that it (they?) identified the smoking gun, and a fact that changed everything
If I start an ai company I guarantee I will get a butthole logo and it will be animated.
Does the openai logo look like that because .. OpenAI? Then others followed suit?
Same, I often wondered why the openai logo looks like an interpretation of goatse.
Because it's the fascination of Sam Altman, they want to be like him.
It's because OpenAI starts with an O, and an O looks like a butthole?
We won’t have real AGIs until they can see this kind of pattern in logos.
Logos reflect the ambient cultural trends. This is the Butthole Age
Is it me, or AI company CEOs' faces, also look like buttholes?
Why'd Bill Gates name his company after his thing?
Ill be honest I wasnt expecting this to be on point
Are people who use lots of AIs butthole surfers?
Because life in the womb starts at the butthole.
That's the universal symbol of enshittification.
imo: sub-conscious messaging to get you used to looking at a loading screen for a large portion of your workday
My son remarked: because they produce shit.
Someone watching too much porn :D.
That was a good and funny read
What is seen, cannot be unseen
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.
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.
Do you know what the ouroboros represents?
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.
Interesting Rorschach test.
AI plop.
It the synthetic IQ goatse
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
Walmart Logo
Perhaps to symbolise the quality of the material they extrude...
Slop rhymes with plop.
hungry man thinks of bread
Reminded me of Gavin Belson Signature from Silicon Valley :-D
A brilliantly designed horizontal logo to fit on server racks!
"I like it! It's bold!" lolol
"Shit in, shit out!" Everything makes sense now
now i cannot unread it .
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!