Carcharhinus was named by de Blainville (1816) [Sepkoski's age data: ]. It is extant. It is the type genus of Carcharhininae, Carcharhinini.

It was synonymized subjectively with Carcharias by Jordan (1907).

It was assigned to Carcharhininae by Hay (1902); to Galeorhinidae by Jordan and Gilbert (1919) and Jordan and Hanibal (1923); to Galeidae by Jordan (1963); to Carcharhinini by Noubhani and Cappetta (1997); to Carcharhiniformes by Sepkoski (2002) and Kriwet (2005); and to Carcharhinidae by White (1926), Arambourg (1927), Casier (1958), Yabe and Hirayama (1998), Purdy et al. (2001), Compagno (2005), Carnevale et al. (2006), Kocsis (2007), Adnet et al. (2007), Cicimurri and Knight (2009), Carillo-Briceño et al. (2014), Reinecke and Radwanski (2015), Carrillo-Briceño et al. (2016), Hastings and Dooley (2017), Szabo et al. (2017), Kent (2018), Ebersole et al. (2019), Landini et al. (2019), Adnet et al. (2020), Villafaña et al. (2020), Collareta et al. (2022) and Cicimurri et al. (2022).