 In comparative morphological studies published by Jack Garrick in 1982 and Leonard Compagno in 1988, it was tentatively placed in a grouping defined by the whitecheek shark ("C. dussumieri") and the blackspot shark ("C. sealei").Shane Lavery, in a 1992 study based on allozymes, reported that this species was close to the nervous shark ("C. cautus") and the blacktip reef shark ("C. melanopterus").Ximena Vélez-Zuazoa and Ingi Agnarsson, in a 2011 study based on nuclear and mitochondrial genes, found it to be the basal member of a clade also containing the graceful shark ("C. amblyrhynchoides"), the blacktip shark ("C. limbatus"), and the Australian blacktip shark ("C. tilstoni").