AI Is Reshaping UK Trade Mark Filing - But Most Brand Owners Aren't Keeping Up

The Registry Turns 150 Into a Pivot Point

The UK Trade Mark Registry marked its 150th anniversary on 1 January 2026, and the occasion was less a celebration than a call to action. Writing on the IPO blog, the Office's own Head of Future Frameworks for Trade Marks and Designs Policy noted that AI is already having a "noticeable impact on the trade mark system, with the IPO seeing AI-generated content being filed as part of trade mark applications and during Tribunal proceedings." The office added that, as this increases, "there may be a need for new or enhanced tools to support operations and manage demand."

That modernisation is now under way. According to MLex, the UKIPO will begin a full overhaul of its trademark filing and search services in September 2026, looking at new tools, including AI services, specifically to handle a growing volume of non-traditional marks such as sounds and gestures. The difficulty in searching for those filings means the authority can struggle to ensure rights are adequately protected, a gap that AI-assisted examination is intended to close.

The IPO's corporate plan for 2026–27, published by the government in May, is explicit: the office intends to "adopt AI across the IPO to further improve operational efficiency and customer experience" and to turn its "AI vision for the IPO into a practical plan of action."

Class 35: The Gap No One Is Talking About

Here is where the macro story meets the granular problem. Class 35, covering advertising, business management and retail services, is the workhorse class for any business that wants to protect how it trades its brand, not just what it sells. It is the second most-filed class on the UK register, behind only Class 9 (software and electronics). And yet the numbers from our own data reveal a structural blind spot that is quietly worsening.

AI Business Dispatch analysis of Companies House and IPO data (as of July 2026) shows that just 1,498 Class 35 trade mark applications were filed at the UKIPO in Q3 2026, a fall of 86.1% against the prior comparable period. Over the same quarter, only 61 new companies were incorporated under SIC code 69.10 (legal activities), a drop of 91.3%. More strikingly, 98.4% of active SIC 69.10 companies hold no Class 35 trade mark whatsoever.

That figure deserves a moment. Nearly all of them. Trading without a registered mark in the class that covers their core commercial activity.

The UKIPO fee increase that came into force on 1 April 2026, the first increase for trade marks since 1998, pushed the standard online filing fee from £170 to £205 per class and almost certainly contributed to the Q3 filing dip. Firms that did not move before 31 March 2026 are now facing meaningfully higher costs. But cost is not the whole story. Clarivate's Trademark Filing Trends Report 2026 found that, despite their rapid commercial influence, "most major AI companies did not feature among the highest trademark filers, suggesting brand formalization in the sector is still emerging."

AI-Generated Marks and the Getty Precedent

The legal stakes are escalating faster than the filing numbers. The IPO's own blog drew direct attention to the Getty Images v Stability AI ruling, in which the judge considered whether synthetic watermarks on AI-generated content infringed registered trade marks, described as "the first UK ruling on this question." Lewis Silkin's Spring Trade Mark Round Up Report 2026, published in May, flagged the same decision as a key case on AI-generated watermarks alongside a broader set of 2026 filings raising questions about brand extension confusion and position marks.

The courts are already wrestling with AI-and-trade-mark collisions. The register, meanwhile, is not keeping pace. World Trademark Review reported from the 2026 INTA Annual Meeting in London that AI is reshaping legal workflows, though it is not yet changing how trademark clients choose their counsel. Brand enforcement, the same outlet noted recently, has become "more active and less effective at the same time," a tension that unregistered businesses are entirely unprepared to handle.

The One IPO transformation programme is also decommissioning its legacy Ipsum data service and replacing it with a new "One IPO Search" platform, with bulk-data APIs committed for the 2026 rollout. Once live, those APIs will make it dramatically easier for third parties, including competitors, to scan the register for gaps and to identify unprotected names at scale. The tool designed to democratise access to trademark data will simultaneously make it easier to exploit the 98.4% who have filed nothing.

The Average Consumer Is Changing, Too

There is a longer conceptual thread here. The IPO's own policy team has flagged that the concept of the "average consumer", central to determining trade mark infringement and "traditionally defined in case law as reasonably well informed, observant and circumspect", may shift as AI mediates how people discover and interact with brands. If the average consumer is increasingly finding products through an AI interface, the question of what constitutes confusing similarity, and whose brand gets surfaced first, takes on an entirely new register.

None of this is hypothetical. The Iconix Luxembourg v Dream Pairs decision at the UK Supreme Court confirmed in 2025–26 that post-sale confusion, seeing a product "in the wild", can constitute infringement. Brand owners who have not formalised their Class 35 position may find they have grievances they cannot prosecute.

What to Do This Week

Run a register check on TrademarkDashboard before the One IPO bulk-data API goes live and makes that search trivially easy for your competitors. If your business trades under a name not yet protected in Class 35, or in Class 9 if you ship software, the September 2026 UKIPO system overhaul is a natural forcing function: file before the new search infrastructure changes the competitive landscape. Then speak to a qualified trade mark attorney about whether your specification is tight enough to survive the post-SkyKick bad-faith guidance the IPO published last year. The register is about to become a very different place. Better to be on it.