Jeff Bezos calls his AI company ‘Project Prometheus.’ So does this California lawyer

Jeff Bezos last month went public with his new AI firm, which is currently being called Project Prometheus. The effort had been in development for a while, but is still relatively secretive. There’s no website and only a sparse LinkedIn page describing itself as “AI for the physical economy.”

The $6.2-billion startup may be facing lots of competition from other AI companies, including giants like Microsoft and OpenAI. At the same time, it may also have to contend with another mysterious and more modest effort that happens to have already filed a trademark application for an AI company with the exact same name.

On November 17—the same day the The New York Times ran a story revealing the new Bezos AI effort—an attorney named Patrick Wallen filed an application for a trademark for “Project Prometheus,” according to the US Patent and Trademark Office website. The address is listed as a residential home in California. It’s the only application that seems to be tied to Wallen, and references a “website” featuring software that “uses artificial intelligence to evaluate, score and benchmark individual performance for purposes of personnel selection, employment assessment, professional development, skills competitions and education.”

Wallen tells Fast Company in an email that he hasn’t heard from the Bezos Project Prometheus and that he’s working at a lawyer scoring platform that uses AI, also called Project Prometheus. Fast Company was unable to identify records related to that company, though there was an LLC registered by a different person in California several years ago. Wallen says he’s been developing the site on Figma, shared a minimum viable product on Figma, and was recently accepted to an incubator.

“I had an original name for my company that didn’t score well. Feedback provided indicated I needed a change. On the day of the Bezos announcements, I scoured the internet to verify the legal reality of these news publications. I looked for the Delaware filing through the Secretary of State. Nothing,” Wallen says. “I did the same in Nevada. Nothing. I looked for a foreign qualification filing in California. Nothing. I looked for a trademark filing in TEAS. Nothing. A LinkedIn company page? Nothing. Form D EDGAR filings with the SEC. Nope.”

“Since their press publication interfered with my marketing strategy, I filed my trademark,” he adds. “I now own the name and it is the name of a real business that—ironically—is designed to demonstrate the skills of a lawyer.”

Wallen’s application did not come from the Bezos Project Prometheus, a spokesperson confirms. His application has yet to be reviewed, according to the USPTO website.

The Bezos AI project—which is being co-led by Vik Bajaj, an adjunct Stanford professor, physicist, and chemist who’d previously helped Alphabet-owned platform Verily—is focused on AI and the physical sciences—and not legal AI—according to the The New York TimesThe company has already hired about 100 people and purchased another startup called General Agents,

These days, many companies have a penchant for choosing titles alluding to science fiction or mythology. The names Anduril and Palantir both come from Lord of the RingsOther examples include Oracle and Nike, which references the eponymous ancient Greek goddess of victory; Prometheus is the name of an ancient Greek titan, The term Project Prometheus has been used previously by DARPA, NASA, and, in the world of the television show Smallvilleby Superman’s arch-nemesis Lex Luthor.

Still, trademark fights can get nasty, particularly for valuable Silicon Valley companies. A device company called iyO sued Open for using “io” in its branding and Elon Musk’s xAI is still facing trademark troubles over the name of its chatbot Grok, which has prompted pushback from similarly named companies. A company called Meta.io also sued Facebook after the social media company renamed itself as part of its metaverse pivot.

“With all due respect to Mr. Bezos, he has every resource in the world at his disposal,” Wallen adds. “His lack of preparation is not a reason for me to alter my plans. On second thought, perhaps he should consider hiring more diligent legal counsel.”