Deinonychus antirrhopus was named by Ostrom (1969). Its type specimen is YPM 5205 and is a 3D body fossil. Its type locality is YPM 64-75, Edwards Ranch, which is in an Albian fluvial-lacustrine claystone in the Cloverly Formation of Montana.

It was recombined as Velociraptor antirrhopus by Paul (1988) and Paul (1988); it was misspelled as Deinonychus antirrophus by Sanz et al. (1992), Le Loeuff et al. (1992), Osmólska (1996), Novas (1996), Chiappe et al. (1996), Turner (1997), Maxwell (1997), Norell and Makovicky (1997), Le Loeuff and Buffetaut (1998), Lipka (1998), Brinkman et al. (1998), Naish (1999), Norell and Makovicky (1999), Burnham et al. (2000), Varricchio (2002), Chiappe (2002), Rauhut (2003), Senter et al. (2004), Norell and Makovicky (2004), Kiernan and Schwimmer (2004), Parsons and Parsons (2004), Weishampel (2006), Martínez and Novas (2006), Senter (2007), Gishlick and Gauthier (2007), Sampson and Witmer (2007), Juárez Valieri et al. (2007), Turner et al. (2007), Torices et al. (2008), Godefroit et al. (2008), Longrich and Currie (2009), van der Lubbe et al. (2009), Knoll and Ruiz-Omeñaca (2009), Parsons and Parsons (2009), Bever and Norell (2009), Chanthasit and Buffetaut (2009), Choiniere et al. (2010), Turner et al. (2011), Goianechini and Apesteguía (2011), Zanno and Makovicky (2011), Apesteguía et al. (2011), Xing et al. (2012), Prieto-Marquez et al. (2012), Gong et al. (2012), Poropat and Kear (2013), Delcourt and Grillo (2014), Sues and Averianov (2014), Frederickson et al. (2015), Parsons and Parsons (2015), White et al. (2015), DePalma et al. (2015), Tanaka et al. (2016), Lee (2016), Norell et al. (2018), Frederickson et al. (2018), Brownstein (2019), Senter and Sullivan (2019), Dalla Vecchia (2020), Jasinski et al. (2020), Averianov and Lopatin (2021) and Suarez et al. (2021).