On August 27, 2025, the USPTO said (quoted at right) that Saturday, September 27, 2025 was the day that the USPTO would shut down the two familiar assignment search systems, forcing users over to a new assignment search function in Assignment Center.
It appears the USPTO has blinked and will postpone this shutdown for about three weeks, until Monday, October 20, 2025.
By way of background, in recent months there have been three ways to carry out assignment searches at the USPTO:
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- By clicking on the “assignments” tab in Patent Center
- By using the familiar Assignment Search (release 2.0.0)
- By using the legacy Assignment Search (version 2.6, also known as AOTW or Assignments On The Web)
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In the past few months, the “assignments” tab in Patent Center has lurched back and forth between functioning and not functioning, depending on whims at the USPTO tied to a lack of confidence that the tab will correctly determine which pieces of information should be visible to the user and which should not.
The familiar and legacy Assignment Searches have the big drawback that they fail to provide information for any application that has not been published.
Given the flakiness of the “assignments” tab in Patent Center, in August of 2024 the USPTO created Form PTO/SB/469. Supposedly if you were to fill out this form listing an application number that has not been published, and email it to the specified email address, the USPTO would create an AOT (Abstract Of Title) for the application and would place it into the IFW (image file wrapper) for the application. As far as I can see, Form SB469 does not work. I say this because I have submitted several of these Forms SB469 in recent months for several of my not-yet-published applications, and the USPTO has failed to take action on any of the Forms SB469 that I submitted.
At right you can see a screen shot from the familiar Assignment Search, which was scheduled to be shut down today. As of today you can still reach this page by clicking here.
At right you can see a screen shot from the legacy Assignment Search, also known as AOTW or Assignments On The Web. It was also scheduled to be shut down today. As of today you can still reach this page by clicking here.
The scheduled September 27 shutdown. As may be seen from the announcement quoted at the top of the article, on August 27, 2025 the USPTO stated that today, Saturday, September 27, 2025 is the day that the USPTO would shut down the familiar Assignment Search and the legacy Assignment Search (AOTW). As of today, supposedly the only way to do an assignment search would be in the poorly designed Assignment Center.
But today, it seems the USPTO has blinked. The new search function that would be provided on the poorly designed Assignment Center is not yet visible. And the threatened shutdown today of the two existing ways of searching assignments has not yet been happened. What one sees when visiting Assignment Center is a banner quoted at right. It says that the search function in Assignment Center will not be visible until three weeks later than announced. The launch will apparently be postponed until Monday, October 20, 2025.
What has changed in Assignment Center is that the USPTO has posted a 56-page PDF file of presentation slides. The slide deck is entitled “Assignment Search Training Guide Patents September 2025”. The title is misleading — the slide deck actually talks about trademark assignment search as well as patent assignment search. Metadata suggest that this slide deck was created on September 9, 2025.
Conspicuous by its absence from this slide deck is any answer to the very important question as to whether a logged-in user of Assignment Center might be able to succeed in a search relating to a not-yet-published application. Maybe the answer is “no”, in which case the customer is stuck using the flaky “assignments” tab in Patent Center or is stuck trying to use Form SB469.
It may take at least another year to undue the nonsense that the previous Commissioner allowed to happen under her watch. Cookbooks and Town Halls about topics that mattered to HER were the priority when functionality of Patent Center and the massive changes made to online filing should have been the focus. The past three years have been vexing for practitioners for sure with poorly throughout rollouts, and morale (so I have heard) has been low among the Examiners as well.