AI is not just showing up in product pitches and investor decks. It is increasingly showing up in Canadian trademark applications. As founders race to brand AI products, the goods and services they file describe artificial intelligence, machine learning, and generative tools more often each year. That trend is measurable, because CIPO publishes the complete record of Canadian trademark applications and registrations as open data, and Clearview maintains a research database built from it, covering the prosecution history of more than two million applications. Searching the goods and services text for AI language shows how quickly the category is growing.
How Clearview identified AI-related applications
There is no AI flag in the trademark register, so any count depends on a definition, and the definition here is deliberately narrow. An application was counted as AI-related if the text of its goods and services description contained at least one of four phrases: artificial intelligence, machine learning, generative AI, or large language model. That keyword test is conservative on purpose. It captures applications that describe AI in the goods and services themselves, and it discloses exactly what it measures so the figures can be checked. It is not a semantic model or a judgment call about which companies count as AI companies. The trade-off is that the count undershoots the real total, a point the caveats below return to.
AI-related applications are rising
On that conservative definition, AI-related Canadian trademark applications more than doubled from 2021 to 2025.
| Filing year | AI-related applications | Share of all filings that year |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 1,344 | 1.6% |
| 2022 | 1,496 | 2.0% |
| 2023 | 1,627 | 2.3% |
| 2024 | 2,088 | 3.0% |
| 2025 | 3,116 | 4.1% |
The share column uses each year's total Canadian trademark filings as the denominator, so it controls for overall filing volume. AI-related language did not just grow in absolute terms. It grew as a proportion of everything filed, from roughly one in sixty applications in 2021 to about one in twenty-four in 2025. The 2025 figure of 3,116 applications, about 4.1% of the 75,118 applications filed that year, is the highest in the series.
What the data likely captures
The applications caught by these terms are the ones you would expect from a growing AI economy. They tend to describe:
- software that uses artificial intelligence or machine learning
- SaaS platforms with machine learning features
- generative AI tools and assistants
- analytics and automation services
- hardware or devices marketed with AI functionality
That fits where the filings land in the trademark classification. Among the AI-related applications from 2021 to 2025, the two most common Nice classes were Class 42, which covers software as a service and technology services, and Class 9, which covers downloadable and recorded software. Of roughly 9,700 AI-related applications in the period, about 7,600 included Class 42 and about 7,100 included Class 9, and many included both, so the category is concentrated in exactly the software and technology space where new AI products compete.
What the data may miss
Because the definition is narrow, the count is a floor rather than a ceiling. It misses several kinds of AI-related filings:
- applications from AI companies whose goods and services do not use the four selected terms
- applications that describe the technology with narrower or more technical wording
- applications where AI is central to the business but is not written into the goods and services
- in the other direction, the occasional application where an AI term is broad or incidental rather than central
The takeaway is that AI-related filing activity is at least what the table shows, and likely higher. The trend, rising every year, is the reliable part.
Why the trend matters for AI brands
A crowding category changes the branding math. When thousands of new applications a year describe similar AI software and services, the pool of available, distinctive names gets tighter and the risk of collision rises. That has a few practical consequences for anyone naming an AI product in Canada. Names that lean on generic AI wording tend to be weak, because a mark that is clearly descriptive of AI goods and services is harder to register and harder to enforce. The concentration in Class 9 and Class 42 means most AI products are competing for distinctiveness in the same two classes, which is what makes a clearance search before launch worth the time. Canada's overall registration rates have run in the mid-60s to low-70s for mature filing years, though a register-wide rate describes outcomes across every kind of application rather than the effect of any one drafting choice.
Naming an AI product in Canada
For founders choosing a brand, the same considerations come up again and again.
- A name that is clearly descriptive of AI goods and services is harder to register and harder to enforce, and may not be registrable at all without evidence that it had acquired distinctiveness by the filing date.
- A generic AI modifier rarely carries a brand on its own, since terms like AI, GPT, or neural are common to the point of being hard to protect.
- The names that hold up are usually built around a distinctive element the business can own, with the AI wording describing the product rather than serving as the brand.
- A mark chosen for the first product may not still fit once the company expands beyond its initial feature set, which is why naming decisions tend to look past the current roadmap.
- Filing strategy for Canada and abroad is easier to set before launch, because changing a name afterward reaches packaging, domains, advertising materials, and any rights already built up around it.
A clearance search is the natural first step, and the full registration process sets out what follows. If timing matters to a launch, the Canadian trademark timeline data shows how long each stage has been taking.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure in this post is Clearview's calculation from CIPO's published records, not a statistic published by CIPO. AI-related applications were identified by searching the goods and services text for the four phrases named above, counting each application once by its filing year. As a check on the pipeline, register-wide totals were reconciled against CIPO's published annual trademark statistics, and registrations issued line up within a fraction of a percent for the two most recent fiscal years. Clearview keeps the current figures on its Canadian Trademark Data page, updated monthly, and freezes each post like this one at its snapshot date.
The takeaway
Applications describing artificial intelligence, machine learning, and generative tools more than doubled between 2021 and 2025, and they now account for roughly one Canadian filing in twenty-four. For a founder, that growth is a reason to treat the trademark as part of the product decision rather than an afterthought, because each year adds more marks a new AI name has to be cleared against.
If you are launching an AI product or software brand in Canada, Clearview can assess trademark availability and prepare a filing strategy before the brand is heavily promoted. The firm's technology and IP practice works with software and AI companies, and its software IP guidance covers the wider protection picture. Fixed-fee trademark registration packages start at $999 plus applicable taxes, prepared and filed by a lawyer who is also a registered trademark agent. Contact Clearview to talk through an AI brand before you launch.