Do software patents only exist for rich players to build a moat against poorer players? At this point with patents of this quality only reason for them to exist seems to be to cross-license them for extra revenue and to possibly block anyone too poor to fight for themselves...
Almost all these patents exist as a war chest and a deterrent against other companies. Everyone theoretically perpetually infringes on each other's obscure patents all the time, but there is a detente between the big players because they hold the gun to each other's heads. If you as a small guy enter the game, you're just shot.
It builds corporate value. If you end up with a portfolio of patents that someone might want to acquire, you've just created a new market for your company. Individual software patents of common quality probably don't matter.
Economically, it’s to avoid free-rider effects. This benefit largely seems alien to tech people because the industry inherently has other moats: network effects, data and code in a server instead of a product sold to consumers that competitors can easily disassemble and reverse engineer, etc.
I don't disagree, but Mistral is hardly a "rich player" in the current AI bubble.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and X are each valued at a trillion or more. Mistral is valued at $20B, 50x less. Even Deepseek is several times bigger than Mistral.
What a time we live in when 20 billion is considered poor... I would consider companies in sub million range to be poor and that is charitable already...
The time we live in is a bubble. Cursor, a company that developed a fork of VSCode that uses AI models they don't own on hardware they don't own got bought for $60B, compare with JetBrains, a company that actually makes some of the best if not the best IDEs in several languages is "only" worth $7B.
$20B is certainly not poor, but in the world of AI and overinflated valuations, it almost is.
Improvements in existing tech can be patented. An RPC call that an AI writes for itself and then executes is a novelty from prior art. Whether it’s non-obvious is up for debate but if it gets past the patent officer that debate happens via lawsuit
Unfortunately there are many patents that simply combine an old thing with a new thing in the obvious way. Since the new thing is new, the combination is "novel".
Seems that this is a patent application from March, so a challenge should still be possible. But it would have to come from a named entity afaik (not a lawyer).
Unfortunately patent offices are using loopholes that reintroduce software patents. Patent law says that a pure software patent is not possible, it has to be combined with a specific hardware application to make it an invention. So they fill in a patent for "XX implemented on a hardware operating on land, in the air, in space, on, or under water.". That's essentially a software patent.
How is the US patent registry easy to search ? I would be curious to see the patent registration of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.
One way or another, I do fully expect every of those companies to try to fill these kinds of "almost for sure invalid and overturnable" patent as a way to defend themselves from every other actor (the classic "Oh I infringed on your patent ? Well here are some of MY patent you are infringing on, so let's call it a day").
The question is whether the method is sufficiently novel or specific enough to the problems/difficulties of solving a specific domain’s problems to warrant a patent.
It’s one of those kinds of patents i assume I’m violating every 100 lines of code I write.
I do wonder if we need a charitable foundation that does software patents and makes them freely available just to stop cockroaches abusing patents.
Another step (although governance would need to be super good for this). Would be for this charity to withold access to these patents from companies that decide to abuse stupid patents.
I think you do not need to register a patent, you can just publish the idea with a verifiable date, that could be considered as a "prior art". I would suggest to make a free website where anyone can publish any ideas although I do not understand how one can prove the publish date. And then the community could publish everything that might be potentially invented in near future to prevent others from getting a patent.
Also I hope this patent is valid only in US and cannot be enforced in China.
I know it’s a joke, but it does make me wonder if LLMs would even be good at assessing if an idea is “novel”.
I only have a rudimentary understanding of how neural networks work, but I wonder if rather than “understanding” what “novel” really means to humans, an LLM would be most likely to agree that something was novel based on having seen that specifically referred to as novel in its training data.
So that if you give it an example of something that already exists, but which was very recently invented at the point in time when the LLM was trained, and you ask “is this a novel idea?” that because it had several sources in its training data describing that idea as novel, it would say “yes that’s a novel idea”. Whereas what we really meant was to ask it if someone else had already thought of this thing prior to us right now in this later moment.
And then on the other hand, even if something was “novel” at the point in time when the LLM was trained, perhaps we would fare better to ask it “has anyone thought of this?” rather than asking if the idea is “novel”? And that even though it considers the idea novel in a way it would also be able to say that yes this has already been thought of.
Can there be consequences for those who grant those patents? It seems the primary examiner Brian W Wathen also granted prior Art patents to Salesforce and NCR Voyix as well.
Still pending, or am I mistaken? Can anyone with knowledge on the US process make an estimate how likely this is to go through? I know of Uniloc and their "efforts", is there a possibility that this could take a similarly damaging path?
Mistral has set off my stink test for a while now, they seem to be a "friendly EU AI provider" who are really an EU mouthpiece for regulation and stifling competition instead of actually innovating
Edit: downvote if you want, but here's another example: "Companies selling artificial intelligence models in Europe should pay a "levy" to support cultural industries, the head of French developer Mistral said on Friday, March 20." https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/03/20/m...
This will not fly anywhere outside France Polish here and the very first question I have is "who would decide which cultural industry representatives would get the money"? And what right the decision makers have to decide that. How about they send few k EUR a month to my friend who is a struggling painter :-D
Somehow I doubt that will happen.
It reminds me of those taxes on CD-R disks to support "Art associations" that were proposed before.
Voices like this are useful to spark a debate on AI basically taking content owned by other people and selling it, but no one will agree to implement anything like what is proposed.
> This will not fly anywhere outside France Polish here
> It reminds me of those taxes on CD-R disks to support "Art associations" that were proposed before.
I find it funny when citizens of a country say things like this. Are you unaware that the Polish government brought in the same tax, 1-3%, on smartphones, laptops, desktop computers and SD cards from November this year? https://tvn24.pl/biznes/tech/nowa-oplata-od-smartfonow-table...
> It reminds me of those taxes on CD-R disks to support "Art associations" that were proposed before.
They're not just proposed, they are implemented in a lot of countries and France actually has the highest CD tax in the EU (and probably in the world but I haven't checked)
They all do that, when OpenAI reached a licensing deal with Reddit, it's to prevent less financially capable competitors to enter the market. (And I'm not saying that's right either)
These don't really do anything, its just investement bait/participation trophies.
Once worked at a startup with a legendary dumbass who would tell anyone who listened about their patent for URL routing in javascript. Please don't hurt yourself rolling your eyes
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and X are each valued at a trillion or more. Mistral is valued at $20B, 50x less. Even Deepseek is several times bigger than Mistral.
$20B is certainly not poor, but in the world of AI and overinflated valuations, it almost is.
Or an Inter Partes Review!
Clearly this is an attempt to prevent similar patents from being weaponised against them in the US.
No one cares about such stuff in Europe.
It’s one of those kinds of patents i assume I’m violating every 100 lines of code I write.
Another step (although governance would need to be super good for this). Would be for this charity to withold access to these patents from companies that decide to abuse stupid patents.
Also I hope this patent is valid only in US and cannot be enforced in China.
The real problem is patents which are trivial and/broad being granted.
I only have a rudimentary understanding of how neural networks work, but I wonder if rather than “understanding” what “novel” really means to humans, an LLM would be most likely to agree that something was novel based on having seen that specifically referred to as novel in its training data.
So that if you give it an example of something that already exists, but which was very recently invented at the point in time when the LLM was trained, and you ask “is this a novel idea?” that because it had several sources in its training data describing that idea as novel, it would say “yes that’s a novel idea”. Whereas what we really meant was to ask it if someone else had already thought of this thing prior to us right now in this later moment.
And then on the other hand, even if something was “novel” at the point in time when the LLM was trained, perhaps we would fare better to ask it “has anyone thought of this?” rather than asking if the idea is “novel”? And that even though it considers the idea novel in a way it would also be able to say that yes this has already been thought of.
Edit: downvote if you want, but here's another example: "Companies selling artificial intelligence models in Europe should pay a "levy" to support cultural industries, the head of French developer Mistral said on Friday, March 20." https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/03/20/m...
Somehow I doubt that will happen.
It reminds me of those taxes on CD-R disks to support "Art associations" that were proposed before.
Voices like this are useful to spark a debate on AI basically taking content owned by other people and selling it, but no one will agree to implement anything like what is proposed.
> It reminds me of those taxes on CD-R disks to support "Art associations" that were proposed before.
I find it funny when citizens of a country say things like this. Are you unaware that the Polish government brought in the same tax, 1-3%, on smartphones, laptops, desktop computers and SD cards from November this year? https://tvn24.pl/biznes/tech/nowa-oplata-od-smartfonow-table...
They're not just proposed, they are implemented in a lot of countries and France actually has the highest CD tax in the EU (and probably in the world but I haven't checked)
So we are just vibe patenting rubbish and rebranding it with AI?
"Patenting rubbish" is a description of pretty much all software patents since forever.
In particular it's the server telling the client to execute arbitrary code in response to a request from the client.
Once worked at a startup with a legendary dumbass who would tell anyone who listened about their patent for URL routing in javascript. Please don't hurt yourself rolling your eyes
What is the point?