Nobody thinks about the UDRP until a complaint shows up. Then the name's locked, the clock's running, and something that sat in your portfolio for eight years without a single inquiry suddenly needs a legal defense.
That's happening more often now.
GigaLaw's Domain Dispute Digest put both UDRP decisions and the number of domains involved up more than 11 percent year over year in the second quarter of 2026. That's 2,324 decisions covering 3,349 domain names. Of those names, 95 percent got transferred to the complainant. About 4.5 percent, 152 of them, drew a denial.
Before anyone panics, that 95 percent isn't the scandal it looks like. Plenty of UDRP filings are aimed at phishing sites and knockoff operations and names that were obviously registered to ride on somebody's brand. Those should end in a transfer. The number says more about who gets filed against than about how panels decide.
But the volume's still climbing, and it's climbing right as AI starts showing up on both sides of these filings.
You can get a professional-looking complaint drafted in about the time it takes to make coffee. Elements organized, arguments laid out, decisions pulled and cited, the whole thing formatted like it came off a firm's letterhead. For a brand owner who actually got targeted, that's real money saved.
It's real money saved for filing something that shouldn't be filed, too.
The Internet Commerce Association just published a rundown of what's already turning up, written by a knowledge lawyer at Hogan Lovells. Citations to cases that don't exist. Quotes that don't match the source. Business plans and valuations generated on the spot to explain a registration after the fact.
In one of the cases it covers, WIPO D2025-4174, a complainant cited decisions that weren't real, alongside others that didn't say what the complaint claimed they said. The panel denied it and found Reverse Domain Name Hijacking. Respondents have run their own version of this, showing up with tidy development plans that read beautifully and prove nothing.
That's the thing about AI writing. Clean prose reads as credible. The tool has no idea whether what it just handed you is true, and neither does the panel until somebody goes and checks.
Don't read too much into that RDNH finding, though. Panels issued 18 of them last quarter across 2,324 decisions, which works out to 0.77 percent. The penalty for filing junk exists on paper. In practice it's close to theoretical.
Some of this cuts the other way. More owners may actually answer a complaint now instead of defaulting, and that'd be a good outcome for everybody. But cheap and fast tilts toward whoever files first, and the party filing first isn't always the party in the right.
WIPO has a note out on AI in its proceedings, and the short version is that reaching for a tool doesn't move responsibility anywhere. The bigger change came in February, with version 3.1 of the WIPO Overview. Section 4.2 now says that where arguments or evidence were built with help from AI tools, the credibility of that material can turn on whether the party includes the specific prompts and what came back, in an annex or otherwise.
Your prompt log is part of the record now, at least if you want the material taken seriously.
When I buy a name, I know exactly why. Dictionary word, or an acronym somebody's eventually going to want. Ask me nine years later and I'm guessing. Meanwhile some company launched using that exact term and is now convinced I registered it back in 2011 because I saw them coming.
The date is your whole case. Sometimes it's the only thing you've got.
Which is why the boring paperwork matters. Where you bought it, what you paid, what the name was worth on its own before anybody else wanted it. Auction invoices. Registrar transfer records. A screenshot of your own lander with a price on it from four years ago. Anything with a date on it that you didn't create after the complaint arrived.
I'm not great at this myself. I've got a spreadsheet going back years, and for the older names it's the only record I have, which is a problem, because a spreadsheet is a document I can edit any time I feel like it and everyone in the room understands that. The invoice from the auction house is worth more than my notes about the invoice.
The rules didn't change. The complainant still has to prove all three elements, same as always. What changed is how fast someone can assemble something that looks like proof.
So save the paperwork. You'll never need most of it, right up until the afternoon you do.