JP Morgan Chase Files Trademark for Finance-Themed Chatbot in US

JP Morgan Chase has filed a trademark application with the US Patent and Trademark Office for a finance-themed AI chatbot named “IndexGPT.”

According to the application filed earlier this month, the tool is intended to assist investors in selecting financial securities and financial assets. 

The application suggests the AI chatbot will provide investment advice in “financial investment in the field of securities” and “funds investment”, as well as in “advertising” and “marketing services”. 

The new application comes after a February survey by JP Morgan revealed that more than half of the institutional traders believed artificial intelligence and machine learning would be the most influential technology in shaping the future of trading over the next three years.

Commenting on the move, trademark attorney Josh Gerben said that he believes JP Morgan’s choice to trademark the chatbot is a “real indication” towards launching a new AI product for investors. 

“Companies like JPMorgan don’t just file trademarks for the fun of it. This sounds to me like they’re trying to put my financial advisor out of business.” 

Aside from the new AI-powered finance chatbot, the institution has also introduced an AI inhouse tool, called Contract Intelligence (COiN), to extract significant information from documents and contracts. 

The AI model, inbuilt by JP Morgan’s economic analysts, analyses the communications from the US Federal Reserve to predict the organisation’s next decision. 

JP Morgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, has praised the technology over the past couple of years. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, he said:

“We have 200 people in AI research labs and we’re already using it to do risk, fraud, marketing, prospecting — and it’s the tip of the iceberg. To me this is extraordinary.”

More Financial Firms Join the AI Race

JP Morgan, however, is not the only financial firm harnessing the power of AI technology.

Global investment bank Morgan Stanley has announced that it is developing tools to assist its wealth managers to better comprehend the mountain of research conducted by the bank regarding the economy and markets. 

In a likewise venture, Goldman Sachs has confirmed that it is considering integrating its own chatbot for its financial advisors to allow them to sort through data and offer more accurate results to clients.

Moreover, in March, an artificial intelligence engineer in the UK, Mayo Oshin, developed a bot named after Buffett to analyze large financial documents.

Meanwhile, as AI technologies continue to get more widespread, the voices warning against the potential dangers of such tools also grow louder.

Just recently, the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Policy, a leading tech ethics group, filed a complaint with the FTC, asking the agency to halt the commercial releases of GPT-4, citing privacy and public safety concerns.

Prior to this, a group of tech gurus, along with some artificial intelligence experts and industry executives, signed an open letter that called for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than GPT-4, citing potential risks to society.