Kentriodon was named by Kellogg (1927) [Sepkoski's age data: T Mi-m Sepkoski's reference number: 1066]. It is not extant. It was considered monophyletic by Geisler et al. (2011).

It was assigned to Delphininae by Hay (1930); to Delphinidae by Kellogg (1928) and Simpson (1945); to Cetacea by Sepkoski (2002); to Kentriodontinae by Barnes (1978), Barnes (1985), de Muizon (1988), Ichishima et al. (1995), Ichishima (1995), Dawson (1996), McKenna and Bell (1997), Fordyce and de Muizon (2001), Lambert et al. (2005), Whitmore and Kaltenbach (2008), Kazár and Hampe (2014), Salinas-Marquez et al. (2014) and Marx et al. (2016); and to Kentriodontidae by Whitmore (1984), Carroll (1988), Benton (1993), Geisler and Sanders (2003), Kazár (2006), Uhen et al. (2008), Fordyce and Roberts (2009), Geisler et al. (2011), Berta (2017), Peredo et al. (2018), Kimura and Hasegawa (2019), Guo and Kohno (2021), Aguirre-Fernández et al. (2022), Godfrey and Lambert (2023) and Nobile et al. (2024).