London, United Kingdom—Artificial intelligence (AI) has recently been a hot topic in any conference, especially its impact on intellectual property rights including trademarks.
AI was discussed in some of the sessions in the 2026 annual meeting of the International Trademark Association (INTA) held in London, United Kingdom from May 2 to 6, 2026.
INTA is a global, non-profit member organization of brand owners and intellectual property (IP) professionals. Based in New York, it supports trademark development, advocates for policy changes, provides education, and hosts major industry events, including an annual meeting with over 10,000 participants.
I asked ChatGPT what is AI and it answered “Artificial intelligence [AI] is the field of computer science focused on creating systems that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence. These tasks include learning from experience [machine learning], understanding language [natural language processing], recognizing patterns [computer vision], solving problems, and making decisions.”
ChatGPT is one of the popular AI platforms utilized in online research by students, in creation of social media content, in digital marketing businesses, in business processing, as tool to streamline tasks and automate processes, language translation processing, and software development.
AI is the discipline concerned with the design and development of automated intelligent systems that perceive, reason out, formulate decisions, and act in an environment to achieve a set of measurable goals.
AI systems embody computational structures that mimic human or animal cognition to process data, learn from experiences, and decide, plan, and act autonomously to satisfy a programmed objective.
AI provides software that can reason on input and explain on output. AI will provide human-like interactions with software and offer decision support for specific tasks.
The growing use of AI in branding, trademark searches and content creation, coupled with the rise of deepfakes and digital replicas, has introduced new layers of complexity to trademark protection, raising pressing questions around ownership, enforcement and liability.
Asia is among the regions with the most active AI applications and the highest concentration of trademark infringements worldwide.
INTA has adopted a resolution passed during the 2025 Annual Meeting which contained the newly adopted principles with emphasis on the importance of balancing innovation with the protection of IPRs:
a. recognition of human contributions: applicable legislation and regulation should acknowledge the source of inputs and outputs, distinguishing between human and machine contributions. This ensures fair reward for human creativity while avoiding unnecessary disclosure requirements.
b. human oversight in IP decisions: final decisions regarding the registrability, protectability, validity, or revocation of IPRs should involve human oversight. AI can be used to reduce errors in judicial or administrative systems, but final determinations must be made by humans.
c. transparency and consumer trust: transparency in the use of AI in creating goods, services, and content is crucial. Consumers should have access to information about the use of AI and the identity of the responsible party, especially when there is a significant legal impact or potential harm.
d. protection of proprietary information: while transparency is important, it must be balanced with the need to protect trade secrets and proprietary information.
In the Philippines, AI systems cannot be inventors or authors, meaning only human-created works are protected by copyright, and only human-directed inventions are patentable. Only natural or juridical persons can be applicants, meaning AI systems cannot own IP.
While AI is not recognized as a legal person, it can be a tool in invention, with IP ownership assigned to the human directing the AI.
AI applications often mine data without distinguishing between protected and non-protected material, risking trade mark and copyright infringement.
The Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL) has been actively integrating AI into its trademark and patent examination systems to enhance efficiency and address the rising volume of applications.
IPOPHL uses WIPO-developed AI tools for similarity searches—phonetic and visual—improving trademark classification and identifying potential conflicts.
The IPO faces challenges with AI-generated trademarks regarding ownership, distinctiveness, and potential flooding of the registration system with derivative works.
Atty. Dennis R. Gorecho heads the Seafarers’ Division of the Sapalo Velez Bundang Bulilan Law Offices. For comments, e-mail info@sapalovelez.com, or call 0908-8665786.
