Autodesk Takes Google To Court Over AI Movie Software Named 'Flow'
1 23Autodesk has sued Google in San Francisco federal court, alleging the search giant infringed its "Flow" trademark by launching competing AI-powered software for movie, TV and video game production in May 2025.
Autodesk says it has used the Flow name since September 2022 and that Google assured it would not commercialize a product under the same name -- then filed a trademark application in Tonga, where filings are not publicly accessible, before seeking U.S. protection.
1 comments
Re:Logical (Score: 5, Informative)
by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @01:39PM (#65978156)
> Google assured it would not commercialize a product under the same name -- then filed a trademark application in Tonga
I guess a trademark beats 'assurance' ?
That summary was gibberish, probably because the original article was hard to understand. But if I understand it correctly, the article appeared to say that Google used the phrase "Google Flow" as a product name in 2025, and assured Autodesk that they would never change it to just "Flow" (without the "Google" part), then dropped the "Google" and applied for a trademark — first in Tonga, then in the U.S.
It took a fair amount of effort to extract that detail from the article, and unless I missed something subtle, the article didn't clearly specify whether Autodesk's trademark is on "Flow" or "Autodesk Flow", nor whether Google's trademark is on "Flow" or "Google Flow". I guess folks could do the trademark search if they're curious, but I would have expected those details to be much more clearly spelled out in the article.
As for me, I just wanted to understand why Autodesk asked Google for assurance that they would not commercialize a product called "Flow" if Google had not already released such a product. The "Google Flow" versus "Flow" detail was critical to understanding the summary, and should have been right up at the top of the article, too, but instead was buried in a quote from Autodesk's lawyers. My guess is that the original article's authors didn't fully understand the lawyers' claim, and as a result, the article was just one editor quote trim away from making no sense at all.
My newswriting prof would have run away screaming.