Microsoft Drops Copilot+ PC Branding From New Surface Devices

Microsoft's Surface chief has confirmed that the company's newest Windows laptops will no longer carry the 'Copilot+ PC' label the company created in 2024 to define the AI-PC category. In an interview reported by 9to5Google, Surface Corporate Vice President Brett Ostrum told Windows Central at the Snapdragon Summit that the new devices "are not called Copilot+ PCs" even though "they do meet all the requirements of our previous bar for what Copilot+ devices are."

Qualcomm, whose Snapdragon X silicon anchored the program at launch, is aligned with the retreat. Kedar Kondap, the company's SVP of compute and gaming, told Windows Central that the badge is unlikely to return. The label was meant to set "a certain bar and metric," Kondap said, and vendors can now deliver that experience "probably without just using terminology now."

The badge, introduced in 2024, required a neural processing unit capable of 40 trillion operations per second, at least 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. Recall, the local-AI feature meant to justify the class, drew immediate security criticism from researchers and shipped late, after which the label became a hardware checklist consumers had trouble parsing. Ostrum said Microsoft still wants to "lean into the narrative around AI on the edge and being able to have a hybrid solution," just without a dedicated brand around it.

New laptops from Dell and Nvidia have also stopped using the label, per 9to5Google, and the fate of the dedicated Copilot key on keyboards remains unresolved. It is the second Copilot-related retreat we have tracked this week, alongside a companion piece on Microsoft rebuilding Copilot around enterprise rather than the consumer chatbot race.