Patent filing has become a singular battlefield, and there is one area where things are getting especially tricky: artificial intelligence. If you have an idea with a future, patent it. The big technology companies know this very well, and they have been doing it for years to protect their intellectual property and defend their assets.
As a Statista report points out, China does not stop patenting. In the last 2 years, several Chinese companies have had a frenetic activity in the registration of artificial intelligence patents. Two giants stand out in particular: Tencent and Baidu already have more than 9,500 patents each.
Possibly the surprise in that particular ranking is Ping An, a holding company with subsidiaries in the insurance and financial services sector. Based in Shenzhen, this company has gone from having just 46 patents related to artificial intelligence in 2017, to having 6,410 in 2021. Among its developments are tools to analyze facial microexpressions that are later used to evaluate the complaints that its clients send by video . It seems that its pace of filing patents has slowed slightly in recent months.
In the field of patents, IBM has always been a benchmark, but things have changed in the artificial intelligence sector, where this company is trailing Chinese companies. It has 7,343 patents, a remarkable number but less than that of the Chinese giants. Microsoft, with 5,821, and Alphabet, with 4,068, are also prominent players in this field.
In the field of artificial intelligence, the interest in registering patents has been evident since 2017. A second chart from Statista shows how Microsoft, which dominated this field, has been outpaced by Chinese companies, as well as IBM and Samsung.
But China’s is amazing. The same has happened with Alphabet, Intel or Appple, which are growing less pronouncedly: Chinese companies are the ones that have not stopped in this field, and there we should also highlight Huawei, which is on its way to unseat the aforementioned Alphabet and Intel. The data is from the consultancy LexisNexis, specialized in the field of patents.
Patents for everything. In the last decade, China has applied for 389,571 patents in this area, which means that its share is 74.7% in this framework, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Of course: the vast majority of them are rejected primarily for being too abstract. For trying, let it not stay.
Published by The Tampa Herald, news and information agency.