Microsoft quietly drops Copilot+ branding from its new laptops

Microsoft drops the Copilot+ label

Microsoft has quietly stopped applying the Copilot+ branding to its new laptops, according to Tom's Hardware. Brett Ostrum, corporate vice president of Surface, confirmed the change in an interview with Windows Central on the sidelines of Snapdragon Summit 2026. Per Ostrum, the new devices still meet the hardware requirements that defined the Copilot+ program — the label itself is what has been dropped.

A two-year experiment in NPU tiers

Microsoft introduced Copilot+ in 2024 to set apart Windows machines with genuine local AI capability from other devices, which either lacked an NPU or fell short of the performance bar. That bar was silicon: a qualifying device needed a neural processing unit delivering more than 40 TOPS. The goal was to establish a premium class of laptops that could run AI workloads on-device rather than in the cloud.

That bet did not pay off. Tom's Hardware describes the launch as disastrous and the resulting sales as poor, and a little over two years later the company has walked away from the brand without any announcement comparable to the one that introduced it. The report, which surfaced on the Hacker News front page, also notes that the branding had become controversial in its own right.

The requirement survives, the marketing does not

There is an important distinction in Ostrum's confirmation: this is a retreat from a label, not from the underlying hardware. The new laptops still meet the NPU performance threshold, meaning Microsoft has not abandoned capable AI silicon — it is declining to sell it as a distinct category.

That leaves the program in an odd position: a certification with no name on the box. For PC makers and chip vendors, Copilot+ was the hook for positioning AI-ready machines as a premium tier. Without it, NPU throughput risks becoming just another line on a spec sheet rather than the basis for a category of its own.

Why it matters

The quiet retirement of Copilot+ is one of the clearest signals yet that NPU-based differentiation failed as a consumer pitch. The core premise — that buyers would pay for a class of laptops defined by local AI performance — did not survive contact with the market, at least as Tom's Hardware tells the story.

For Microsoft, folding the label away suggests AI capability is becoming a baseline expectation for hardware rather than a premium feature to advertise. For the wider PC industry, it removes the most prominent attempt to turn on-device AI into a product category, and it leaves an open question about what replaces it: whether AI features settle into table stakes across all laptops, or whether Microsoft tries a new framing once it finds one that sells.

The setting of the confirmation underscores the awkwardness. It came at Snapdragon Summit, a chip industry event, while the NPU arms race that Copilot+ was meant to champion is still very much running. The brand that was supposed to make that race matter to shoppers is not.