Deepfakes, Scatter-Guns and a Register Under Strain: The AI Brand Crisis Hitting UK Trademark Law

Brand names and faces have always been valuable. But something new is happening at the UK Intellectual Property Office this summer, and it is not entirely comfortable for the profession charged with protecting IP.

The World IP Review's UK Trademark Rankings 2026, published yesterday, contains a detail that deserves wider attention. Practitioners told the WIPR team that AI-generated deepfakes are now driving a reactive, wide-spectrum filing strategy: a "scatter-gun approach" to trademark and copyright registrations, taken in the absence of any specific statutory right that public figures can lean on. That is not an indictment of the lawyers involved. It is an honest admission that existing law is struggling to keep pace with generative AI.

The Enforcement Problem Has No Clean Answer

The deepfake pressure on the UKIPO register is real and well-documented. Jeremy Clarkson trademarked an image of his face after fake AI social media posts in 2024 depicted him endorsing cryptocurrency. Luke Littler filed a similar application at the UKIPO following comparable concerns. Cole Palmer's UK registrations of his face, name and distinctive goal celebration were granted last November. In the United States, Taylor Swift registered sensory trademarks of her voice and likeness in late April 2026; Matthew McConaughey has been granted eight registrations covering face, voice and catchphrases.

The legal reasoning behind all of this is straightforward enough. Copyright law requires substantial copying from an identifiable source. Generative AI synthesises output from vast training data, producing likenesses that may not meet that threshold. Trademark infringement, by contrast, turns on likelihood of consumer confusion, a standard that does not depend on copying. As Norton Rose Fulbright noted in analysis published earlier this summer, the UK government's March 2026 report on copyright and AI acknowledged the limitations of existing protections without proposing a wholesale remedy.

So trademark law fills the gap. But the gap is wide, and the tools are imperfect. An IP associate quoted in specialist press has noted that UK trademark law is business-focused: you must be selling something to justify a filing, and non-use within five years can lead to cancellation. There is a legitimate question about how a celebrity continuously "uses" a catchphrase in the legal sense required to maintain a registration.

A Register Under Pressure

This is happening against a backdrop already stretching UKIPO capacity. The WIPR Rankings report notes practitioner frustration with "woeful" pendency times at the office, which raised fees by an average of 25% in April 2026, the first increase in trademark fees since 1998, and simultaneously rolled out the first major phase of its One IPO digital transformation. Revocation and cancellation proceedings have surged post-Brexit, as brand owners clear conflicting registrations from the UK register.

The UKIPO is also examining AI tools internally. In May 2026, MLex reported that the office will begin overhauling its trademark search infrastructure in September, including assessing AI-powered services to manage a growing volume of non-traditional filings such as sounds and gestures: precisely the category of mark now being used in deepfake-defence contexts.

At the EU level, the EUIPO's 2026 Guidelines, which entered into force on 1 July, tighten specification requirements considerably. Vague or generic wording is no longer acceptable; virtual goods must be identified with precision. The new guidelines also coincide with the 13th edition of the Nice Classification, which came into force in January 2026. That update formally introduces "Artificial Intelligence as a Service" as a named term under Class 42, a small but symbolic acknowledgement that AI is no longer a novelty but a registrable commercial reality.

The Legal Services Blind Spot

While celebrities and athletes scramble to register faces and voices, the businesses closest to trademark advice itself appear to be systematically under-protected in a class that might surprise you.

AI Business Dispatch analysis of Companies House and IPO data (as of July 2026) shows that only 99 new SIC 69.10 companies (legal and accounting activities) were incorporated in Q3 2026, down 86% on the prior period. Class 25 UK trademark filings fell even more sharply over the same period: 939 filings, down 82.3% year-on-year. The most striking figure is this: 99.8% of active SIC 69.10 companies hold no Class 25 trademark registration whatsoever.

Class 25 covers clothing, footwear and headgear. That might seem irrelevant to a law firm. But where branded merchandise, event clothing and physical brand presence form part of the identity mix that deepfake-defence strategies rely upon, an unregistered Class 25 portfolio is a vulnerability. A firm that sells branded clothing at conferences, issues staff uniforms, or licences its logo to merchandise partners has a legitimate commercial interest in Class 25. Without a registration, that interest is unprotected.

This is not unique to legal services. The broader pattern, visible across the UK register, is that businesses focus trademark protection on their core service classes and leave adjacent goods classes exposed. Deepfake-era brand strategy is making that adjacency more costly.

The WTR Warning on AI-Generated Filings

A second AI risk is running in parallel, on the filing side rather than the enforcement side. World Trademark Review reported this week that US judges are losing patience with lawyers who submit AI-generated fake citations in trademark and other legal proceedings, a pattern that has now embarrassed some of the most prestigious firms in the country. As AI tools lower the cost of drafting submissions, the temptation to trust unverified outputs rises. The professional consequences of doing so do not.

For UK and EU practitioners, the message from both the EUIPO's tighter 2026 guidelines and emerging US case law points the same direction: precision matters more now, not less. AI can accelerate research and drafting. It cannot replace the review step that catches hallucinations before they become sanctions.

What Brand Owners Should Do This Week

Audit your trademark portfolio for adjacent goods classes, including Class 25, that carry your brand into physical or event contexts. If you are a public figure or a company whose identity is materially tied to a person, voice or distinctive visual element, take professional advice on whether non-traditional marks, such as sound marks, motion marks and image marks, are appropriate and registrable at the UKIPO. If AI tools form part of your clearance or filing workflow, treat their output as a first draft, not a final answer. Check TrademarkDashboard for live conflicts before any new filing, particularly given the backlog now building at the UKIPO.