Last month Allbirds, the sustainable shoe company, sold off its footwear brand, renamed itself Smartbird, and moved into selling servers built around AI chips. The stock jumped.
Allbirds was far from alone. According to the Financial Times', at least 28 US-listed companies have renamed themselves around AI since 2023, and at their peak they were collectively worth 106% more, some $8.7 billion, than in the week before they announced the change.
Then the novelty wore off. More than half of that gain has since evaporated, and 7 of the 28 are now worth less than they were before they reached for the name.
Part of the reason is who was buying. Most are microcap stocks and their new names are aimed at retail investors trading on their phones. Owen Lamont, a portfolio manager at Acadian Asset Management, puts it plainly:
Companies cater to current investor sentiment. If investors like things that have AI in the name, the companies will cater to that, and if that changes, they'll cater to the other thing.
Sentiment, not conviction, and sentiment doesn't sit still.
The deeper reason is that the word no longer says anything. Nearly every company now uses AI in some form, so putting it in your name makes no claim; it's like announcing that you have a website. Having AI is not something the market pays for, it assumes it. What it pays for is what you do with it.
Some companies had a real answer. Cipher Mining, a bitcoin miner, became Cipher Digital in February. Mining bitcoin burns enormous amounts of electricity, so miners had already built sites wired into the grid at scale. Power is now the scarcest input in AI, and Cipher already owned what its new customers wanted, holding billions in data-centre leases with Amazon and Google. Smartbird's CEO, for her part, rejects the word rebrand, calling hers 'the creation of a new AI infrastructure company'. The ones with something underneath the name would rather be judged on the business than the badge.
Others had no answer at all. Myseum, a small social network, became Myseum.AI in April. They reported a revenue of $550 for the whole of 2025, against a net loss north of $3 million. Here the word is doing all the work, because there's nothing behind it to do any.
In 2017 a struggling drinks company called Long Island Iced Tea renamed itself Long Blockchain, with no blockchain business. The share price rose 500%. Four years later the SEC revoked the registration of its shares and the company was caught up in an insider-trading investigation.
Since 2024 the SEC has been bringing cases over what it calls AI washing, misleading investors about how they actually use the technology. There's no rule against changing your name. But as Sean Fulton, a lawyer in DLA Piper's AI practice, puts it: 'If adding "AI" to a company's name signals a business line or capability that doesn't exist, that's the kind of statement likely to draw scrutiny from the SEC.'
This changes what a name is. For years it was a marketing decision, a matter of how it sounded. Now it's something you can be held to, read by the market and regulators the same way they read your numbers. The word on the door has to match the business behind it because people are starting to check.