GenAI Patent Surge Extends Well Beyond Familiar Platform Firms

Companies with no known ties to artificial intelligence have recently become prominent owners of generative-AI patents. Over the last two years, more GenAI patents were published than in the last decade according to a recent analysis by the World Intellectual Property Organization and analytics firm EconSight.

Businesses within the energy, infrastructure, manufacturing, and telecommunications industry have logged some of the fastest-growing patent activity instead of developing AI models — a shift that lawyers and economists who study AI and intellectual property say reflects the technology’s deepening reach into the broader economy.

This pattern reveals something counterintuitive about how AI is maturing: The companies leading the technology’s development aren’t necessarily the ones staking out intellectual-property territory — and what that divergence ultimately means remains an open question.

Finnegan partner and co-leader of the firm’s AI practice Karthik Kumar spoke with Bloomberg Law and said, “Sophisticated clients are treating this as a period to build and to position, in anticipation of enforcement activity that most expect to intensify.”

Where companies are choosing to file, Karthik said, strategies are increasingly deliberate: greater use of continuation practice, a strategy for filing successive related applications to keep patent families open as inventions evolve; closer attention to drafting claims resilient to Section 101 patent-eligibility challenges; and landscape analysis ahead of product launches.

He identified four areas most likely to generate future enforcement activity: the technical infrastructure enabling AI systems to run efficiently; applied sectors including financial services and healthcare, where damages theories are easiest to construct; agentic and multimodal systems as they mature; and non-practicing entities.

“An assertion wave is being seeded now but has not yet fully arrived,” Karthik said.

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