US company Google has filed applications to protect its trademarks in Russia

The company, which is complying with Western sanctions against Russia, submitted an application to Rospatent on September 12 to register a new trademark Google AI Edge. The application was filed for ICGS classes 9 and 42 (software, machine learning, artificial intelligence).

• Google AI Edge is a low-code, cross-platform system for rapidly building applications using artificial intelligence.

“I assume this is done to strengthen its position among Russian developers of applications using AI,” Vladimir Korshunov, co-founder and CEO of AgroSignal, explained to RB.RU.

According to the expert, Google is registering a tool for developing applications with artificial intelligence, aimed primarily at mobile devices. The company is obviously looking to strengthen its Gemini model and seems to focus on developers, Korshunov said.

According to Alina Sidorova, a patent attorney at Online Patent, Google is actively protecting its new IT products on the Russian market by registering trademarks. This will allow the company to prevent illegal use of its names and will allow it to claim up to 5 million rubles in damages for infringements.

Alina Sidorova adds that in 2024 the American corporation filed several applications for trademark registration in Russia. The company decided to protect Google Vids (sharing short videos over the Internet, application filed on May 27), Google Axion Processor (central processing units, microchips, microprocessors, August 16), Google Gemini (AI for creating human voice and other technologies, August 1).

Sidorova recalled that in Russia there are attempts to register names similar to the Google trademark. For example, Min LLC tried to register the trademark “OK Google”, and “OK, Google” and g00g1e, on the other hand, for crackers and flavourings.

According to Sarkis Grigoryan, head of the artificial intelligence competence center of the Digital Economy Development Fund and head of the artificial intelligence club at the Skolkovo business school, it is not difficult to explain Google’s desire to register new trademarks in Russia.

“This is a large and forward-looking technology corporation with many different business interests, including financial ones. Its departure from Russia, of course, was not so much due to desire as to pressure from those jurisdictions where the company is registered globally. At the same time, of course, from a strategic point of view, the corporation probably realizes that sooner or later it will have to return to work in our market,” Sarkis Grigorian said.

• Google AI Edge and similar services simplify initial development and are therefore available to anyone who is seriously involved in the operation and training of their models, the expert added. For example, Open AI, Sberbank and Yandex have similar services. But it is worth noting that Google’s service is focused on low-code, where a user without deep programming knowledge, using blocks, images and databases, can assemble them into a whole,” Sarkis Grigoryan explained.

Under US sanctions that came into force on September 12, Google decided to disable the BigQuery cloud service in Russia, which had been operating for 10 years. The service was used to process and analyze a large amount of data. In March 2022, Google disabled monetization for Russian Youtube bloggers, and in August 2024 it finally closed Adsense for Russians. The company also bankrupted its Russian subsidiary Google LLC.

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