Authored by: Jeremy J. Gustrowsky
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently announced the release of a new artificial intelligence tool designed to speed up one of the most time-consuming steps in trademark application processing. Called the “Classification Agentic Codification Tool” (or “Class ACT”), the system is described as a first-of-its-kind AI agent that handles key pre-processing tasks for trademark applications. Specifically, Class ACT can assign international classes to unclassified applications and generate the design search codes and pseudo marks that make trademark records searchable by examining attorneys and practitioners.
To understand why this matters, it helps to know what happens before a trademark application reaches an examiner’s desk. Applications that include logos, designs, unconventional spelling, or that lack an international classification can be difficult to search against existing records. Historically, USPTO employees have manually added design search codes, pseudo marks, and international classifications to these applications to make them findable. With the surge in trademark filings in recent years, this manual process had stretched to several months, creating a bottleneck that delayed examination and affected applicants.
Class ACT is intended to eliminate that bottleneck. According to the USPTO, the tool can now provide classification and coding information almost immediately and with a high degree of accuracy. Importantly, the AI-generated information is still reviewed by human employees at the USPTO before it becomes final. The agency emphasized that the tool is meant to free up examining attorneys to focus on the substantive legal questions involved in trademark examination, rather than spending time on preliminary data entry and classification work.
The USPTO indicated that additional AI-powered tools for trademark operations are in development and expected to be released in the near future. For trademark applicants and practitioners, the practical takeaway is that the period between filing an application and having it ready for examination should shrink considerably, potentially improving overall pendency times.
Whether Class ACT lives up to its ambitious billing remains to be seen, but the concept of using AI to handle routine, high-volume classification tasks is a logical application of the technology. Practitioners should keep an eye on how this tool affects search quality and examination timelines going forward.