A Chinese state-owned power utility holds more published GenAI patent families than Google.

Patent rankings are tracking where AI is being applied, and several frontier labs have opted out of them.

Christopher Yasiejko reported the pattern for Bloomberg Law on August 10, working from WIPO's July SPARK update. Cornerstone Research's Shane Oka, on why the model developers stay off the list: “Secrecy is king.” OpenAI only held 35 patent filings globally as of late 2025.

Application Layer Leaders vs. Frontier Labs

Platform developers still populate the list. SoftBank leads published GenAI families at 2,985, virtually all filed in 2023 and published in 2025, with Tencent, Ping An, and Baidu behind it. Alphabet (Google) leads U.S. owners at 1,083, ahead of Microsoft and IBM. State Grid Corporation of China sits at 1,144, filing on grid optimization and predictive maintenance. Bosch is staking out AI automation for physical manufacturing. Oka reads the non-lab filings as protecting specific applications inside existing businesses.

Key Strategic Implications for IP Portfolios

  • Enforcement is still in the early phases. Finnegan's Karthik Kumar identifies four areas where activity should surface first: technical infrastructure that lets AI systems run efficiently; 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.” Filing strategy is tracking that expectation: continuation practice, Section 101 resilience, and pre-launch landscape analysis.
  • Publication of a Chinese filing matters for US applicants. Bradley's A.J. Bahou: “It doesn't take a Chinese patent to issue in order to block a US later-filed invention. It only takes publication and sharing that idea with the world.”
  • The counts establish high volume but not necessarily strategic value. WIPO's Christopher Harrison: “A large portfolio is not necessarily the same as a strategically potent one, and the data do not allow us to readily distinguish between the two.” Oka cannot say whether these filers are uniquely positioned to capitalize or have simply made a bet that others are not currently making. “But whether this is part of a longer-term strategy, I think, remains to be seen.”

Secrecy vs. Public Record

Kumar gives the reason both postures can be rational: “The public patent record is an incomplete proxy for where the real value ultimately lies.” Operating companies are putting the application layer on the record. Several model developers are keeping weights, data, and methods as secrets and treating release speed as the advantage. Both elections are made against an 18-month publication lag, which is why the 2025 wave reflects choices made in 2023 and 2024, and why today's choices stay invisible until enforcement is already underway.

Sources

  1. Christopher Yasiejko, GenAI Patent Surge Extends Well Beyond Familiar Platform Firms, Bloomberg Law (Aug. 10, 2026): https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/genai-patent-surge-extends-well-beyond-familiar-platform-firms
  2. WIPO, Patent Trends Update in GenAI, Technology SPARK Report Series, WIPO Pub. No. 1089.3/26 (July 2026): https://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/wipo-pub-1089-3-2026-en-patent-trends-update-in-genai.pdf
  3. Family counts are published GenAI patent families, 2014-2025, per WIPO Figure 3. OpenAI's 35 is a count of patent filings globally as of late 2025.