Types under the typing module used to behave like other python classes regarding the __name__ attribute before Python 3.7. The behavior seems to have changed to a non-standard way.

Py3.6 
>>> from typing import List
>>> dir(List)
['__abstractmethods__', '__add__', '__args__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__', 
'__dir__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__extra__', '__format__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__getitem__', '_
_gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__init_subclass__', '__iter__', '__le__', '__len_
_', '__lt__', '__module__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__next_in_mro__', '__orig_bases__', '__origin
__', '__parameters__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__reversed__', '__rmul__', '__setattr__
', '__setitem__', '__sizeof__', '__slots__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__', '__tree_hash__', '_abc_cache',
 '_abc_negative_cache', '_abc_negative_cache_version', '_abc_registry', 'append', 'clear', 'copy', 'count'
, 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove', 'reverse', 'sort']
>>> List.__name__
'List'


Py3.7:
>>> from typing import List
>>> dir(List)
['__args__', '__call__', '__class__', '__delattr__', '__dict__', '__dir__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__format__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getattribute__', '__getitem__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__init_subclass__', '__instancecheck__', '__le__', '__lt__', '__module__', '__mro_entries__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__origin__', '__parameters__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__slots__', '__str__', '__subclasscheck__', '__subclasshook__', '__weakref__', '_inst', '_name', '_special', 'copy_with']
>>> List.__name__
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python3.7/typing.py", line 699, in __getattr__
    raise AttributeError(attr)
AttributeError: __name__
>>> List._name
'List'

Bisecting this issue revealed that this happened on commit 

d911e40e788fb679723d78b6ea11cabf46caed5a is the first bad commit
commit d911e40e788fb679723d78b6ea11cabf46caed5a
Author: Ivan Levkivskyi <levkivskyi@gmail.com>
Date:   Sat Jan 20 11:23:59 2018 +0000

    bpo-32226: PEP 560: improve typing module (#4906)

    This PR re-designs the internal typing API using the new PEP 560 features.
    However, there are only few minor changes in the public API.


The reason seems that now all of the types are created using `_GenericAlias` that does not copy the `__name__` attribute.

Oh I just re-read my comment and there are so many typos that I will write a new one, sorry.

This is an intentional change. It would be a bad idea to use `__name__` instead of what is currently `_name`, because semantics is subtly different. Also the fact that types in typing module used to be actual class objects was an implementation detail (also typing module is still provisional).

The problematic part here is that special types and generic type aliases are still documented as _classes_ in https://docs.python.org/3.7/library/typing.html, I think this needs to be updated. (Plus we should add an explicit note somewhere in the docs that static types and runtime classes should not be confused.)

I believe we can close this issue.

It has been fixed in scope of this issue - https://bugs.python.org/issue44524

Agree with Yurii. This is no longer an issue in 3.10 onwards. Thanks to Yurii for providing the fix in the other issue.