WIPO counts 54,000 generative artificial intelligence patent families, with China filing six times the United States total

2024-07-03Research

World Intellectual Property Organization, "Patent Landscape Report: Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)," WIPO Patent Landscape Reports series, 116 pages (Geneva, 2024), ISBN 978-92-805-3649-2 (online), released with WIPO press release PR/2024/921, "China-Based Inventors Filing Most GenAI Patents, WIPO Data Shows" (3 July 2024)

The report counts 54,000 patent families for generative artificial intelligence inventions published between 2014 and 2023, against more than 75,000 scientific publications over the same period. More than a quarter of the patent families were published in 2023 alone; annual families rose from 733 in 2014 to more than 14,000 in 2023, and the report dates the acceleration to the 2017 introduction of the transformer architecture. Inventors located in China account for 38,210 families, inventors in the United States for 6,276, the Republic of Korea for 4,155, Japan for 3,409 and India for 1,350, with India showing the fastest average annual growth at 56 percent. The ten largest applicants are Tencent (2,074), Ping An Insurance (1,564), Baidu (1,234), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (607), IBM (601), Alibaba (571), Samsung Electronics (468), Alphabet (443), ByteDance (418) and Microsoft (377). By data mode, image and video lead with 17,996 families, followed by text at 13,494 and speech or music at 13,480; diffusion model families rose from 18 in 2020 to 441 in 2023 and large language model families from 53 to 881. Life sciences (5,346) and document management and publishing (4,976) are the largest application areas, and generative models account for 6 percent of all artificial intelligence patents. The report assigns patents to models, modes and applications from abstracts, claims and titles, and locates inventors by the addresses on the patents.

What it changesSix of the ten largest filers and about 70 percent of the families are Chinese, and much of that material is published only in Chinese. A prior art search or freedom-to-operate opinion on a generative model feature that covers only United States and European publications is reading a fraction of the field, and an examiner searching Chinese full text will find what it missed. Budget for a search that covers CNIPA publications in the original language on every generative artificial intelligence filing and on every clearance for a feature in text, image or speech generation. The second consequence is timing: with more than a quarter of the art counted published in the last year of the period, the months between conception and filing are when the closest reference is most likely to appear, so provisionals on generative features should go in on the disclosure date, not the product schedule. The figures count inventor locations, not assignee countries, so they understate United States companies with research staff in China.

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Burbage Law is the practice of Jon Burbage, a registered patent attorney. 342 United States patents have issued from applications he wrote; the full list is on the Patents page. More about Jon Burbage.

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