A species from Mount Mulayit called the Tenasserim white-tailed willow warbler (Acanthopneuste davisoni) named after the collector William Ruxton Davison was described by Eugene Oates in 1889.

Another subspecies was described by the American ornithologist Herbert Girton Deignan in 1956 and given the trinomial name Phylloscopus davisoni intensior.

Since ogilviegranti was the first described of the three members of the clade it was elevated to a species and the two others made into subspecies since the sequence differences were small.

[4] A study of the mitochondrial DNA sequences and calls suggested that davisoni in the strict sense was a sister of Seicercus xanthoschistos.

[5][6] This left the form intensior which was unrelated and was then elevated as a full species and a second subspecies was added to it, P. i. muleyitensis (Dickinson & Christidis, 2014).