Microsoft quietly drops Copilot+ branding from new laptops

Microsoft launched the Copilot+ brand in 2024 to differentiate its offerings with local AI capabilities from other devices that do not have NPUs or fail to meet the minimum 40+ TOPS requirement. But a little over two years after the disastrous launch and poor sales, the company has quietly moved away from the brand. Microsoft Surface CVP Brett Ostrum confirmed this to Windows Central in an interview on the sidelines of Snapdragon Summit 2026.

“These are not called Copilot+ PCs,” Ostrum said. “They do meet all the requirements of our previous bar for what Copilot+ devices are. We still lean into the narrative around AI on the edge and being able to have a hybrid out there.” Even other devices that would’ve been eligible under the branding, including the upcoming Nvidia RTX Spark N1X and Microsoft’s own Project Zenith, are missing the Copilot+ badges. The company also said that it’s scaling back Copilot’s presence in Windows 11, promising to improve the operating system’s performance, reliability, and updates. Microsoft also vowed to optimize it to run smoothly on just 8GB of RAM amid the AI-driven memory shortage.

However, that doesn’t mean Microsoft is backing away completely from Copilot. Despite dropping the hardware branding, it’s still working on numerous AI features for its product lineup. The company recently revamped Copilot and added new features like Home, Code, and Autopilot. It has also tested Copilot+ AI features that run on discrete GPUs, possibly expanding the feature set to PCs that use processors without a built-in NPU. In fact, one AI consultant mapped out Microsoft Copilot products and discovered more than 80 unique offerings, with many more possibly unaccounted for.

Microsoft did not give a specific reason for dropping the branding, but as many modern mainstream and high-end processors now come with NPUs that can hit 40 TOPS or more, it seems that it no longer makes sense to offer that differentiation. Aside from that, the current memory chip shortage has made the minimum 16GB requirement rather expensive, with Microsoft even purging its 32GB RAM recommendation from its website and releasing brand-new Surface for Business laptops with as little as 8GB of RAM.

It’s still unclear if the quiet sunset of the Copilot+ brand means that every Windows 11 PC will now get all the AI features that were once locked behind the name. But even if it will no longer exist on the hardware side, we still expect the Copilot branding to stay inside Windows and other Microsoft products for better or for worse.

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