WIPO Publishes Patent Landscape Report on GenAI

On July 3, 2024, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) published a Patent Landscape Report on Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). The report provides a historical and technical overview of GenAI technologies, who and where the top patent owners are, what types of GenAI models are being patented the most, and more.  This post examines some of the findings of the report. 

Who are the top patent owners?

US-based IBM, Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, and Adobe are among the top 20 owners in GenAI patent families from 2014-2023. Meanwhile, Tencent Holdings, Ping An Insurance Group, and Baidu, all based in China, took the top three places. The report also notes that China has been both the top location for inventors of GenAI patent families and the top jurisdiction where these patents were filed. Other Chinese entities in the top 20 are the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Alibaba Group, and ByteDance. These trends suggest that China may have been more permissive with granting patents on GenAI technologies than other jurisdictions.

What types of GenAI applications are being patented?

The success of ChatGPT has placed a spotlight on GenAI technologies that produce text. With GenAI technologies having so many applications, inventors are creating models that produce a variety of outputs, ranging from images to music to lines of code. From 2014-2023, GenAI that outputs image and video was patented the most, followed by text, then speech, voice, or music. GenAI is also being implemented in countless industries. Interestingly, WIPO reports that in the last three years, patents directed to the use of GenAI in energy management and agriculture have seen the most growth. Other fast-growing applications are in security, life sciences, and banking and finance.

The technological advances in GenAI are reflected by the sharp increase in patenting activity. Over the past 10 years, the number of patent families in GenAI has grown from just only 733 in 2014 to more than 14,000 in 2023.

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