AI Patent Trends in the U.S. Patent Office: Is the U.S. Losing Its Lead?

As noted in an earlier post on this blog (Using AI to Track AI Patents at the USPTO), the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) continues to see tremendous growth in the area of Artificial Intelligence (AI). While the USPTO’s October, 2020 Report “Inventing AI: Tracing the diffusion of artificial intelligence with U.S. patents” utilizes a broader set of metrics to gauge the number of AI filings generally, a simplified claims-based metric shows that U.S. applicants appear to be losing ground as the dominant filers in this field to increasingly diverse global competition.

Patent searches performed on the USPTO Patent Application Full Text and Image Database and on the Patent Full Text and Image Database show that, since at least 2017, applicants from the United States have been the largest filers of AI patent applications as measured by those applications whose claims contain at least one of the phrases “neural network” and “machine learning.”  (By comparison, the number of published applications containing at least one of the phrases “neural network” and “machine learning” in the application in general, and not just in the claims, was 37,241 in 2020 as opposed to 8,197 when limited to the claims.) While that claims-based metric is not as all-encompassing as the USPTO’s set of metrics, it does help to identify applications that are directed to inventions where one of those exemplary AI components is sufficiently important to the application that it actually appears in the claims.

Read the full article at the link below.