WIPO counts 37,808 generative artificial intelligence patent families published in 2025, nearly triple 2023

2026-07-14Research

World Intellectual Property Organization, "SPARK: Patent Trends Update in GenAI," WIPO Technology SPARK series (July 2026), with press release PR/2026/957, "GenAI Innovation Soaring, With Patent Activity Nearly Tripling in Two Years" (Geneva, July 14, 2026)

The World Intellectual Property Organization updated its 2024 report on generative artificial intelligence patents through 2025. Published generative artificial intelligence patent families rose from about 14,000 in 2023 to 18,862 in 2024 and 37,808 in 2025, so the more than 56,000 families published in those two years exceed the total for 2014 through 2023. Generative families were 8.7 percent of all published artificial intelligence families in 2025, up from 6.1 percent in 2023. Families directed to large language models rose from 881 in 2023 to more than 14,100 in 2025, overtaking generative adversarial networks, with diffusion models third; code-generation families rose from 339 to 1,616. China-based inventors published more than 43,000 families in 2024 and 2025. Families with United States inventors grew from about 1,185 in 2023 to more than 4,380 in 2025, and Japan's from 398 to 3,835, a compound annual growth rate of 210 percent driven largely by SoftBank, the largest holder with 2,985 families, nearly all published in 2025. Alphabet has 1,083 families, Microsoft 865, IBM 821 and Nvidia 497, and the report counts 35 filings by OpenAI. Only about 9 percent of 2025 families, 3,297, were international families. The counts are of published families, which lag filing by about eighteen months.

What it changesThe prior art against a generative artificial intelligence claim is now dense, recent and largely in Chinese and Japanese, and most of it was filed in one country only: with about one family in eleven filed internationally, a search confined to United States and European publications will miss most of what an examiner in Beijing or Tokyo, or a well-funded challenger, can cite. Budget machine-translated full-text searching of Chinese and Japanese publications into every freedom-to-operate and validity study on language models, and draft claims to large language model systems on the assumption that the general architecture, the retrieval pattern and the agent loop are already in someone's publication. The same numbers show where assertion risk sits: the largest holders are SoftBank, research institutions, utilities and the large platform companies, not the model laboratories, whose own filings remain small. Because published counts lag filings by eighteen months, the 2025 figures describe what was filed in 2023 and 2024.

More on What the AI companies are filing

← All recent developments · Search all developments

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.

This is general information about a published decision, agency guidance or piece of legislation. It is not legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Items concerning offices outside the United States are reported for information only and are not counsel on the law of those countries.