On Tuesday, the Chinese startup DeepSeek filed an application for trademark registration with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), but it turned out that they had already been beaten to the punch by another company — and only by 36 hours.
According to TechcrunchAccording to the USPTO, the first application for trademark registration was filed by a company called «Delson Group Inc», which has been allegedly selling artificial intelligence products under the DeepSeek brand since early 2020. In the application, the company indicated that it is based in Cupertino and its CEO and founder is Willie Lu.
According to Lu’s LinkedIn profile, he has worked as a consulting professor at Stanford and is an advisor to the Federal Communications Commission It gets more interesting: Lu graduated from the same university as China’s DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng — Zhejiang University.
TechCrunch journalists also discovered that Lu is conducting an educational course called «DeepSeek» in Las Vegas on «AI superintelligence», the price of which starts at $800. The description of the course states that its founder has «approximately 30 years of experience in information and communication technologies and AI».
Meanwhile, a search for «Delson Group» in the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board’s trademark query system opens up more than two dozen disputes between Lu and organizations such as the GSMA, Tencent, and TracFone Wireless. The company itself abandoned some of the trademarks for which it had applied or canceled pending applications.
A detailed review of the USPTO trademarks revealed a total of 28 marks owned by Delson — and some of them are actually owned by large Chinese companies (for example, Lu’s company has registered the trademarks «Geely» and «China Mobile»)
All of these details indicate that the company is likely to register trademarks quickly for resale, taking advantage of the brand’s popularity. A similar model «work» was once used by Chinese businessman Zhang Baosheng, who successfully registered the trademark of the English name «Tesla» in China, as well as the Tesla logo «T», font and Chinese transliterated name (he later agreed with Tesla to resell it for an undisclosed amount).
«DeepSeek may actually have a trademark problem in the United States, where the previous owner of the rights — the Delson Group — may come forward and make a strong case for infringement», says Josh Gerben, attorney and founder of Gerben IP. «They were the first to file the application and claim to have used it earlier — 2020 versus DeepSeek’s claimed early 2023 — and they have a live website that shows AI-related activities, including training events».
In fact, OpenAI itself has been in a similar situation, having failed to register a trademark «GPT» after the USPTO recognized the term as too general. Over the past few months, Sam Altman’s startup has also fought for the right to use the phrase «Open AI» with technologist and entrepreneur Guy Ravin.
As a reminder, the issue of of the latest DeepSeek reasoning modelshook up the artificial intelligence market,by crashing the shares of key companies in the industry. It was reported that the model outperformed the latest OpenAI models in some key tests, but it is available for free and, most importantly, it allegedly used much less money and effort to train. Yesterday, Sam Altman’s company announced that it had evidence that the Chinese AI model «stole» ChatGPT data for training purposes.
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