OpenAI claims the control in the prompt box that sets how many tokens the model may spend on an answer, and the Office allowed it before it published

2026-10-15Filings

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United States Patent Application Publication No. 2026/0319862 A1, OpenAI OpCo, LLC, "Adaptive Compute Allocation Display for Generative Response" (the title as printed on the publication; the Office's application record reads "Adaptive Compute Allocation Display for Generative Response Engines"), Application No. 19/194,991, filed April 30, 2025, claiming priority to Provisional Application No. 63/786,668 filed April 10, 2025, published October 15, 2026

Claim 1 is a method in which the front end to a generative response engine shows, in the prompt composer, an indicator that opens a compute allocation interface with a selector object manipulated by a pointer device, offering a default setting and at least one greater or lesser setting; the setting controls the relative amount of tokens the engine may generate for the response, the engine receives the prompt and the setting together, and the greater setting makes it use more tokens than the default while the lesser setting makes it use fewer. Dependent claims add a trained model that predicts how long the prompt will take at the default setting and shows that estimate in the interface (claims 2 and 3), the same model choosing which version of the engine to use and preferring the more efficient one until the prompt calls for a more capable one (claims 4 through 6), keeping the setting for the rest of the conversation thread (claim 12), sending the setting to a data center load balancer (claim 15), and, in claims 23, 24 and 26, defining the setting as a maximum token budget, as an amount of time the engine may spend reasoning, and as counting the tokens generated during reasoning. The published set is an amended one: twenty-two claims numbered 1 through 27, with claims 9 through 11, 20 and 21 absent and claim 25 marked canceled. The Office's Open Data Portal file history shows a Track One request granted May 23, 2025, non-final rejections mailed July 9, 2025 and February 6, 2026, a final rejection mailed October 23, 2025, three applicant-initiated examiner interviews, a request for continued examination on January 15, 2026, a notice of allowance mailed June 5, 2026, a second request for continued examination filed July 9, 2026 with an information disclosure statement, a second notice of allowance mailed August 25, 2026, and an amendment after allowance filed October 1, 2026; as of October 11, 2026 the issue fee had not been paid. The application published at eighteen months from the provisional, on the first publication Thursday after the October 10, 2026 date, after it had already been allowed twice.

What it changesThe prior art that matters is not OpenAI's own: o3-mini shipped on January 31, 2025 with low, medium and high reasoning effort options in the application programming interface and a higher-effort model in the ChatGPT picker, which the one-year grace period covers if the disclosure came from these inventors, but Anthropic announced Claude 3.7 Sonnet on February 24, 2025 with a developer-set thinking budget of up to N tokens and a user's choice in the applications between answering normally and thinking longer, forty-five days before the provisional, and the exception for a third party's disclosure that follows the inventor's own reaches only the subject matter the inventors had themselves disclosed first. That is why the claim lives in the composer: the selector object moved by a pointer device, the greater and lesser settings around a default, and, in claims 2 and 7, the duration estimate shown beside them, which is also why a developer who sets a token budget through an application programming interface is outside claim 1 as published and a consumer product with a thinking-effort control in its own prompt box is not. Compare the shipped interface to the published claim now rather than at grant, because the allowance has already happened and the next event is a patent number. The file is the second lesson: Track One and three interviews bought a first allowance in thirteen months, and the request for continued examination filed after that allowance, with an information disclosure statement, is the price of art that surfaced late; a program that finishes its own search before paying for Track One does not buy that second cycle.

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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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