After two years of backlash, Microsoft seems to be dropping Copilot+ branding from its new laptops

Published Sep 26, 2026, 2:18 PM EDT Patrick O'Rourke is XDA's News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint's Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He's based in Toronto. Over the past 15 years, he's written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more. Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University. Sign in to your XDA account Summary Microsoft quietly removed Copilot+ branding from its new laptops, even though they meet NPU requirements. Partners say the devices still deliver local AI/NPU experiences but won't use the Copilot+ label. Microsoft is scaling back Copilot integration in Windows 11 while still adding features. In 2024, Microsoft launched Copilot+ branding to emphasize a laptop's local AI capabilities, including an NPU with at least 40 TOPS and at least 16GB of RAM. The branding move wasn't received very positively, to say the least, and a little over two years after launching the Copilot+ name, Microsoft seems to have quietly ditched it with its latest Surface devices. In an interview with Surface Corporate Vice President Brett Ostrum at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit, Window Central asked directly about the future of Copilot+ after Microsoft revealed the new Snapdragon X2 Plus-powered Surface Pro 12-inch and Surface Laptop 13-inch without the branding. "These are not called Copilot+ PCs," said Ostrum. "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," said Ostrum. Other devices that would typically feature the branding, including upcoming Nvidia RTX Spark-powered laptops from various manufacturers, also lack Copilot+ branding. During a roundtable interview I attended at the Snapdragon Summit, Kedar Kondap, Qualcomm's SVP of Compute, was surprisingly candid about his thoughts on Microsoft's Copilot+ PC branding. "...the purpose of Copilot+ PCs was to be able to deliver [NPU] experiences. So it was to define a certain category of devices with a certain bar and metric; for example, a 45 TOPS NPU... So from that perspective, it's more about offering the same experiences, probably without just using [Copilot+ PC] terminology now," said Kedar. Microsoft has been pulling back on Copilot's Windows 11 integration, but the AI platform isn't going anywhere CEO Satya Nadella recently called its refreshed Copilot "a new OS for work" Over the past several months, Microsoft has scaled back Copilot's presence in Windows 11 alongside improving various parts of the operating system, including performance, updates, and reliability. The tech giant even said it plans to make Windows 11 run smoothly on 8GB of RAM, a welcome move given the ongoing memory shortage. To be clear, Copilot definitely isn't disappearing with this branding change. The AI boom is still going, and Microsoft has a lot riding on Copilot. The tech giant recently added new Copilot features like Home, Code, and Autopilot, and CEO Satya Nadella called this revamped take on Copilot "a new OS for work."