Having my name on a bunch of software patents - and, yes, I tried to get my name off them, but was not allowed - I can fairly confidently say: There is not A single worthy software patent out there. You know, one that is "not obvious to someone skilled in the art" and that actually protects a monetary investment.
Software patent are a scourge of the software industry. Patents are designed to protect costly research; simply having an idea is not costly (but it makes in medical research for example). All that software patents do is creating a minefield that hinders competition.
For software Copyright is a far better instrument. Let the one with best implementation win... That's where the cost is: Implementing, testing, shipping, maintaining. Protect that.
Anyone who has ever taken part in a software patent litigation ... or in the creation of a software patent, knows intimately that its a bunch of bullshit.
The boogieman that software patent advocates raise is that IP theft and free riding will destroy America if we don't have patents. But literally nobody is creating software to get a patent on it, and software patents don't stop anyone from replicating software.
Instead software patents are just a way for mediocre lawyers to live parasitically off the tech industry.
Imagine a world where we were so worried about bullying that we created a department to monitor all speech on the Internet, and you had to run your speech past lawyers for approval before saying anything. And you could be sued for saying anything by anyone if you didn't get lawyer approval. That would be a world with dramatically less bullying than the Internet today. AND a much worse world with much less communication. AND in that alternate world, the lawyers would argue that there would be more bullying if we put that ridiculous system to an end. And they would be right that there would be some more bullying, AND it would also be right that that degree of bullying would be worth it to have free speech.
Similarly with patents. Yeah, on the margins there might be more IP theft. SO WHAT. This system right now sucks.
It feels more like an arms-race to me. Where I work we patent stuff for defensive purposes only, so we have something when we get sued (and we have been).
Maybe that's just another boogieman, but it seems unless everybody stops nobody can.
From a laymans perspective they also don't seem to work. Apple's multitouch felt like something brand new to consumers and yet other device manufacturers copied it anyway. Facebook entire product line is dependent on ripping off competitors unique features. What's the point?
>For software Copyright is a far better instrument. Let the one with best implementation win... That's where the cost is: Implementing, testing, shipping, maintaining. Protect that.
But this is minimally protectable, and you can copy the idea just not the exact implementation. Copyright does not have a 'doctrine of equivalents' equivalent. It also supports independent creation. Copyright also does not cover functional elements. You cannot copyright an idea, only the expression. So maybe you can elaborate more on why your point makes sense?
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.
You may have heard about a little thing called MP3? Basically, Fraunhofer in Germany filed for (software) patents in the US. They made sure to wait some time for MP3 to become a thing before they started going after people and collect royalties.
Ha, you're misremembering, but it's been a long time so I don't begrudge you.
Fraunhofer is a research institution. They didn't really do licencing, that's why they never went after anyone.
Then Thomson joined the venture (wouldn't you know it, French!) and the fun with litigation got started
Not trying to protect Frauenhofer there at all, if they didn't smell opportunity they wouldn't have teamed up with Thomson after all... But I think the trend is very clear. Germans are generally a lot worse at the litigation game then the french. Historically that makes sense, but it's definitely surprising that it still holds true in modern times
I think you didn't understand what I was trying to say.
Fraunhofer didn't do licencing before joining up with Thomson. That's why - back in the 90s - there were no litigation anywhere even though everyone ignored their patents.
Then Frauenhofer joined up with Thomson and that's where your understanding joins up with reality: now the Frauenhofer does licencing and sues anyone that's not paying them.
My whole comment was a technical tidbit - maybe meaningless from today's perspective... But the previous view interpreted a forward thinking strategy with the monetization of mp3 that just wasn't there
I feel your argument is shifting. Also, it was Fraunhofer that was threatening developers at the end of the 90s not Thomson. Fraunhofer will very aggressively defend their patents/licenses.
> Clearly this is an attempt to prevent similar patents from being weaponised against them in the US.
Why do we assume that Mistral is a "good guy" protecting themselves? I'm not sure they necessarily are. Could just be trying to grab any ground they can.
I mean, maybe they are the "good guy", but I don't think we know either way.
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".
You pay the lawyer in thousands to use a language which meets the criteria for the patent. Thousands of software patents are repetition of each other with some thing in particular worded differently
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).
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
There is _some_ prior art here, though it’s not direct. This is very similar in concept to the joke Python extensions that replaced the global exception handler with one that invokes an LLM.
There are “workflows” that are very similar. Ie I can invoke a Python function that doesn’t exist and the exception gets handed off to an LLM to make it work by making that function exist.
This is functionally similar from what I can gather. Invoke a tool that doesn’t exist, we’ll make it exist for you.
It’ll probably get a patent issued, though, the patent office seems asleep at the wheel in the tech space at least.
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...
Software patents are probably unenforceable in most cases, at least in the US and Europe, are essentially unenforceable. The European Patent Office, very sensibly, denies software patents.
The USPTO has a strange insistence on granting them even though they aren't legally valid. Therefore, if you have a lot of money, you might file a software patent for one of four reasons:
1) You hope that the US courts might one day change their minds and start enforcing software patents.
2) You hope that you might scare people in to giving you licensing fees even though you know the patent won't be enforced.
3) You want to prevent others from scaring you in to giving them licensing fees.
4) You want to get a patent because it's impressive/looks good on your resume.
I filled a patent in France. That was denied by the French office as being a conceptual method More than an invention. I accepted that decision. But there is a completely unexpected side effect, explained to me by a patent advisor. I probably now can oppose that nullified patent to any patent that would implement a version of that conceptual method. Not sure of the reality of that statement, but that’s a funny backfire.
> The USPTO has a strange insistence on granting them even though they aren't legally valid
I recently learned [0] that the USPTO makes it money from patents, its not government funded. Not only that but checking patents loses them net money while maintenance fees are the real cash cow.
The whole system is similar to the revenue model of a shitty journal that just publishes whatever research as long as the author pays. Except the office doesn't even need to care about their reputation in granting dubious patents because they have legal backing.
[0] It was a comment on hacker news, that I checked.
It's not the user fee model that's broken, it's the revenue basis. Maybe it would be more effective if they tripled the filing cost and if you successfully obtain the patent (it's rejected by the patent officers), you get half back.
That is why all patents exist. It's ridiculously time consuming and expensive to get a utility patent for anything. I invented something at my old company 5 years ago and the patent process is still ongoing, should hopefully get awarded this year. It costs tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and you need to actively litigate infringements if you want to keep it. 99% of patents exist just for legal bullying and the other 1% are actually novel, useful inventions.
Yeah you're right, I was thinking of trademarks. I just think the system is very cumbersome and antiquated, these days it mostly serves to benefit patent lawyers rather than inventors and small businesses, aside from highly regulated fields where things move slower.
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.
In theory patents are also to protect smaller players (though not dirt poor), from getting their work ripped off by bigger players after demonstrating feasibility. The idea of being an "inventor" professionally only really works with patents. Software patents pushes this model to logical extremes though. I run a small startup that trains models for medical devices and the only way to get any of the large players to care about implementing improvements you make (and not rip you off) seems to be to have some patent protection. They are mostly interested in the patents as assets to prevent their competitors from acquiring. In all honesty I'm not completely convinced on software patents either but we've had to adapt.
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.
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.
Setting aside the tech, which looks like an asynchronous await across a network, the interesting question is why Mistral would patent this in the US.
Simple, because the patent is less about protecting an invention than doing business in the US.
The US is more hospitable to software patents than Europe. A US patent also gives Mistral something useful when dealing with companies that already hold large patent portfolios: defensive leverage, cross-licensing, and one more asset on the books to make it attractive to investors.
There's a certain absurdity to it, and the French have a history with absurd. A French open-weights company crosses the Atlantic to put a patent around a loop, not because the code is remarkable, but because the American market makes the loop a valuable asset, business-wise.
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").
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.
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.
For example, I would publish the idea of a "self-driving car" that can drive without or with minimal human supervision using a computer. I believe this is pretty novel and can be called an invention.
Also I hope this patent is valid only in US and cannot be enforced in China.
The problem is that it doesn't work as such. We all know that Meucci invented the telephone but Bell patented it.
The patent office rarely care about it, they register whatever you want, and then lawyers of companies can sue you for using it without permission. Of course you can fight it in court and affirm it's prior art, if you have enough money to pay your lawyer, and do you have more money than OpenAI, Meta, Google? Probably not, so they will just shut you down, that is the sole reason for patents to exist, to preserve monopoly of big multinational companies.
And nowadays that patents are probably written and submitted not even by human but by AI, what stops a big tech with enough money for using a model to generate millions of trivial patent, submit them, and get them approved, for then another AI to search for their usage and sue you for using it?
> what stops a big tech with enough money for using a model to generate millions of trivial patent
It requires a yearly payment and can get quite expensive [1]. There are application, examination, issuing and publishing fees for each patent. In contrast, publishing ideas online is free.
The ironic part of it is, that to my own experience and benchmarks Mistral is by far the worst model from frontier labs at tool calling followed closely by Gemini.
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?
In the US, the patent office almost always grants patents as long as the correct process is followed. They don't really concern themselves with whether a patent could be successfully challenged, they just care about whether the the application is shaped like a patent. They leave it to the courts to invalidate all the bad patents they approve. It's pretty terrible: the very least they could do is ask a random dude in the relevant industry whether there's anything novel there at all, and they don't even do that.
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)
Plenty of things with prior art are successfully patentend. And are successfully enforced, because it is cheaper to pay the troll to cross the bridge than to take it to court. It isn't until the sue the wrong person who has the backbone and the resources to contest it that the patent gets revoked.
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
AI companies business model is that peasants don’t have intellectual property. Everyone who contributed to this filing should be publicly spat upon and shunned.
Having my name on a bunch of software patents - and, yes, I tried to get my name off them, but was not allowed - I can fairly confidently say: There is not A single worthy software patent out there. You know, one that is "not obvious to someone skilled in the art" and that actually protects a monetary investment.
Software patent are a scourge of the software industry. Patents are designed to protect costly research; simply having an idea is not costly (but it makes in medical research for example). All that software patents do is creating a minefield that hinders competition.
For software Copyright is a far better instrument. Let the one with best implementation win... That's where the cost is: Implementing, testing, shipping, maintaining. Protect that.
Sorry for the rant.
Edit: Spelling
I agree in general, but can think of at least one counterpoint: https://terathon.com/blog/decade-slug.html
Actually novel implementation is protected, paid the author's bills, and was dedicated to the public domain recently - no massive corp involved.
Copyrights for protecting software seems likely to die on the altar of LLMs. It seems likely patents will become more important.
Anyone who has ever taken part in a software patent litigation ... or in the creation of a software patent, knows intimately that its a bunch of bullshit.
The boogieman that software patent advocates raise is that IP theft and free riding will destroy America if we don't have patents. But literally nobody is creating software to get a patent on it, and software patents don't stop anyone from replicating software.
Instead software patents are just a way for mediocre lawyers to live parasitically off the tech industry.
Imagine a world where we were so worried about bullying that we created a department to monitor all speech on the Internet, and you had to run your speech past lawyers for approval before saying anything. And you could be sued for saying anything by anyone if you didn't get lawyer approval. That would be a world with dramatically less bullying than the Internet today. AND a much worse world with much less communication. AND in that alternate world, the lawyers would argue that there would be more bullying if we put that ridiculous system to an end. And they would be right that there would be some more bullying, AND it would also be right that that degree of bullying would be worth it to have free speech.
Similarly with patents. Yeah, on the margins there might be more IP theft. SO WHAT. This system right now sucks.
It feels more like an arms-race to me. Where I work we patent stuff for defensive purposes only, so we have something when we get sued (and we have been). Maybe that's just another boogieman, but it seems unless everybody stops nobody can.
From a laymans perspective they also don't seem to work. Apple's multitouch felt like something brand new to consumers and yet other device manufacturers copied it anyway. Facebook entire product line is dependent on ripping off competitors unique features. What's the point?
I think the point is to prevent researchers from changing jobs.
1. Researcher makes something
2. Employer patents it using researcher's name
3. Researcher gets a new job
4. Researcher makes something at new job vaguely similar to #1
5. Old employer sues for patent violation
By attaching their name to the patent, it is easy to prove they were aware of it.
>For software Copyright is a far better instrument. Let the one with best implementation win... That's where the cost is: Implementing, testing, shipping, maintaining. Protect that.
But this is minimally protectable, and you can copy the idea just not the exact implementation. Copyright does not have a 'doctrine of equivalents' equivalent. It also supports independent creation. Copyright also does not cover functional elements. You cannot copyright an idea, only the expression. So maybe you can elaborate more on why your point makes sense?
It is quite funny an EU company patenting a software feature that is basically unpatentable in EU in the US.
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.
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.
> operating on land, in the air, in space, on, or under water
Thunderbirds are Go!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_mBUaPsX6o
You may have heard about a little thing called MP3? Basically, Fraunhofer in Germany filed for (software) patents in the US. They made sure to wait some time for MP3 to become a thing before they started going after people and collect royalties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing,_ownership,_and_...
Ha, you're misremembering, but it's been a long time so I don't begrudge you.
Fraunhofer is a research institution. They didn't really do licencing, that's why they never went after anyone.
Then Thomson joined the venture (wouldn't you know it, French!) and the fun with litigation got started
Not trying to protect Frauenhofer there at all, if they didn't smell opportunity they wouldn't have teamed up with Thomson after all... But I think the trend is very clear. Germans are generally a lot worse at the litigation game then the french. Historically that makes sense, but it's definitely surprising that it still holds true in modern times
Fraunhofer absolutely does licensing. That is one of their main sources of income. Also,your retelling of the story is off: https://www.4ipcouncil.com/features/mp3-digital-audio-coding
I think you didn't understand what I was trying to say.
Fraunhofer didn't do licencing before joining up with Thomson. That's why - back in the 90s - there were no litigation anywhere even though everyone ignored their patents.
Then Frauenhofer joined up with Thomson and that's where your understanding joins up with reality: now the Frauenhofer does licencing and sues anyone that's not paying them.
My whole comment was a technical tidbit - maybe meaningless from today's perspective... But the previous view interpreted a forward thinking strategy with the monetization of mp3 that just wasn't there
I feel your argument is shifting. Also, it was Fraunhofer that was threatening developers at the end of the 90s not Thomson. Fraunhofer will very aggressively defend their patents/licenses.
> Fraunhofer is a research institution. They didn't really do licencing, that's why they never went after anyone.
> Then Thomson joined the venture (wouldn't you know it, French!) and the fun with litigation got started
How is this shifting?
1. Past tense with Frauenhofer 2. Present tense with Thomson
Legit wtf
> I think you didn't understand what I was trying to say.
They don't do this sort of thing... oh wait, they do.
But we are still wrong to judge their character by their own actions, because... evil French people made them do it?
> Clearly this is an attempt to prevent similar patents from being weaponised against them in the US.
Why do we assume that Mistral is a "good guy" protecting themselves? I'm not sure they necessarily are. Could just be trying to grab any ground they can.
I mean, maybe they are the "good guy", but I don't think we know either way.
So anyone have prior art we can point to? Because no way is a rpc call novel.
September 26, 2025: https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/
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".
Law says must be NON obvious
The patent office applies a much lower "non-obviousness" threshold than how a technical person would interpret that word.
You pay the lawyer in thousands to use a language which meets the criteria for the patent. Thousands of software patents are repetition of each other with some thing in particular worded differently
I didn't carefully read either of these, but it reminds me of https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode-mcp/ (note it predates the filing).
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).
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
There is _some_ prior art here, though it’s not direct. This is very similar in concept to the joke Python extensions that replaced the global exception handler with one that invokes an LLM.
There are “workflows” that are very similar. Ie I can invoke a Python function that doesn’t exist and the exception gets handed off to an LLM to make it work by making that function exist.
This is functionally similar from what I can gather. Invoke a tool that doesn’t exist, we’ll make it exist for you.
It’ll probably get a patent issued, though, the patent office seems asleep at the wheel in the tech space at least.
> but if it gets past the patent officer that debate happens via lawsuit
Or an Inter Partes Review!
Is “by an LLM” the new “on a computer” for lame patents?
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...
Software patents are probably unenforceable in most cases, at least in the US and Europe, are essentially unenforceable. The European Patent Office, very sensibly, denies software patents.
The USPTO has a strange insistence on granting them even though they aren't legally valid. Therefore, if you have a lot of money, you might file a software patent for one of four reasons:
1) You hope that the US courts might one day change their minds and start enforcing software patents.
2) You hope that you might scare people in to giving you licensing fees even though you know the patent won't be enforced.
3) You want to prevent others from scaring you in to giving them licensing fees.
4) You want to get a patent because it's impressive/looks good on your resume.
I filled a patent in France. That was denied by the French office as being a conceptual method More than an invention. I accepted that decision. But there is a completely unexpected side effect, explained to me by a patent advisor. I probably now can oppose that nullified patent to any patent that would implement a version of that conceptual method. Not sure of the reality of that statement, but that’s a funny backfire.
> The USPTO has a strange insistence on granting them even though they aren't legally valid
I recently learned [0] that the USPTO makes it money from patents, its not government funded. Not only that but checking patents loses them net money while maintenance fees are the real cash cow.
The whole system is similar to the revenue model of a shitty journal that just publishes whatever research as long as the author pays. Except the office doesn't even need to care about their reputation in granting dubious patents because they have legal backing.
[0] It was a comment on hacker news, that I checked.
> its not government funded
It's not the user fee model that's broken, it's the revenue basis. Maybe it would be more effective if they tripled the filing cost and if you successfully obtain the patent (it's rejected by the patent officers), you get half back.
That surely wouldn't benefit incumbent large organizations against small time inventors
it's been a while since the patenting system benefit small time inventors
Also, corollary from the above: you want to make lawyers happy in an acquisition because of the above, which allows you to sell for more $
That is why all patents exist. It's ridiculously time consuming and expensive to get a utility patent for anything. I invented something at my old company 5 years ago and the patent process is still ongoing, should hopefully get awarded this year. It costs tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and you need to actively litigate infringements if you want to keep it. 99% of patents exist just for legal bullying and the other 1% are actually novel, useful inventions.
Patents also exist for defensive purposes e.g. if you go after us for x, we will countersue for y.
Google + Motorola aquisition vs Apple is a prime example.
> you need to actively litigate infringements if you want to keep it.
No you don't. That being said, what is the point of a patent if not to enforce the right of exclusivity it grants as to the invention?
Yeah you're right, I was thinking of trademarks. I just think the system is very cumbersome and antiquated, these days it mostly serves to benefit patent lawyers rather than inventors and small businesses, aside from highly regulated fields where things move slower.
That poster mixed it up with trademarks, for which enforcement is required to maintain its validity.
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.
In theory patents are also to protect smaller players (though not dirt poor), from getting their work ripped off by bigger players after demonstrating feasibility. The idea of being an "inventor" professionally only really works with patents. Software patents pushes this model to logical extremes though. I run a small startup that trains models for medical devices and the only way to get any of the large players to care about implementing improvements you make (and not rip you off) seems to be to have some patent protection. They are mostly interested in the patents as assets to prevent their competitors from acquiring. In all honesty I'm not completely convinced on software patents either but we've had to adapt.
> The idea of being an "inventor" professionally only really works with patents.
Well, trade secrets could also do the trick?
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.
Is that a stated purpose or a POSIWID purpose?
The real truth is that's how Edison used them and they've been the primary use of patents since inception.
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.
The big one believes themselves ready to rival "government power"
Btw, OpenAI words, not mine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49232778
They exist so you can not be forbidden to do what you invented.. but there might be unintended correlation ;)
Precisely the reason is to give breathing room for big players to invest in development of technology so they can capitalise exclusively for a period
in what world is mistral a big player?
Mistral is not a rich player in the context of AI. It is minor smaller company, basically.
Patent for the most basic pattern seen in literally all of software engineering
Or it’s a patent for ”a method” of doing that, that is much more specific?
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.
Setting aside the tech, which looks like an asynchronous await across a network, the interesting question is why Mistral would patent this in the US.
Simple, because the patent is less about protecting an invention than doing business in the US.
The US is more hospitable to software patents than Europe. A US patent also gives Mistral something useful when dealing with companies that already hold large patent portfolios: defensive leverage, cross-licensing, and one more asset on the books to make it attractive to investors.
There's a certain absurdity to it, and the French have a history with absurd. A French open-weights company crosses the Atlantic to put a patent around a loop, not because the code is remarkable, but because the American market makes the loop a valuable asset, business-wise.
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").
https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/ try this
Believe it or not, but law offices make heavy use of https://patents.google.com/
This is markedly better than the USPTO website, FWIW.
It should be embarrassing and shameful to apply for such a trivial patent.
Businesses know no shame, if applying for a trivial patent is useful, they will of course do so.
The real problem is patents which are trivial and/broad being granted.
Not the first time, not the last time in US patent history ...
“Claude, please review my repo for any work that could be novel enough to receive a patent. Be liberal in your definition of ‘novel’”
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.
How does this make sense? It is public knowledge/pattern.
Given I wrote an article describing the same things years before they submitted the patent, could I not invalidate their patent with that?
Cloudflare introduced Code Mode far earlier (https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/)
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.
This is called CodeAct (https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01030) and is available in a number of frameworks.
Patent was applied for 04.03.2026. langgraph-codeact _shipped_ this capability in February.
including Anthropic[0] and OAI[1]
[0]: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-us...
[1]: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/tools-programm...
The irony is that it's not probably not patentable in Europe.
I read somewhere that the US Patent Office is like a candy store for other countries to pick up cool tech and continue local development.
Likely from Palmer Luckey, who coined the term 'Chinese instruction manuals'
Priority date of March 4 2026 and claims this patent is novel on that date, clearly trying it on. Hope it gets struck down.
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.
For example, I would publish the idea of a "self-driving car" that can drive without or with minimal human supervision using a computer. I believe this is pretty novel and can be called an invention.
Also I hope this patent is valid only in US and cannot be enforced in China.
The problem is that it doesn't work as such. We all know that Meucci invented the telephone but Bell patented it.
The patent office rarely care about it, they register whatever you want, and then lawyers of companies can sue you for using it without permission. Of course you can fight it in court and affirm it's prior art, if you have enough money to pay your lawyer, and do you have more money than OpenAI, Meta, Google? Probably not, so they will just shut you down, that is the sole reason for patents to exist, to preserve monopoly of big multinational companies.
And nowadays that patents are probably written and submitted not even by human but by AI, what stops a big tech with enough money for using a model to generate millions of trivial patent, submit them, and get them approved, for then another AI to search for their usage and sue you for using it?
> what stops a big tech with enough money for using a model to generate millions of trivial patent
It requires a yearly payment and can get quite expensive [1]. There are application, examination, issuing and publishing fees for each patent. In contrast, publishing ideas online is free.
[1] https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/fees-and-paymen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_patent_aggregation
The ironic part of it is, that to my own experience and benchmarks Mistral is by far the worst model from frontier labs at tool calling followed closely by Gemini.
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?
In the US, the patent office almost always grants patents as long as the correct process is followed. They don't really concern themselves with whether a patent could be successfully challenged, they just care about whether the the application is shaped like a patent. They leave it to the courts to invalidate all the bad patents they approve. It's pretty terrible: the very least they could do is ask a random dude in the relevant industry whether there's anything novel there at all, and they don't even do that.
Can't beat them... litigate?
TONS of prior art.
Cocorico !! Well played Mistral ! Really funny since software patents does not exist in France ...
But... why? Isn't that what smolagents[0] has done from the beginning? Also this move is blackening Mistral in my book.
[0] https://github.com/huggingface/smolagents
Can somebody care to explain if the 2013 and 2006 refer to IDs or reference to past years.
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)
Mistral aren't an EU mouthpiece. They're a startup backed by Microsoft, nVidia, and Salesforce.
There are many ways for a business to survive outside of innovation
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)
what an insane thing to have a patent for.
EU AI innovation is really amazing.
no shot my gpt-3 discord chatbot that did this beats it as prior art
Getting a patent on software is mid-brain mid-manager shit to pad marketing and inflate egos, doesn't really do anything.
I could copy this "design" exactly and it would be totally fair to use. Exhibit 270 is my favorite
Novel bro, novel.If Apple lost the "Swipe" patent on a device they pioneered, your standard HTTP API is probably not that original.
"Fair use" is not a defense in patent law
That's fair
Plenty of previous art.
I have prior art, there's a ton of prior art GitHub, good luck with that patent.
Plenty of things with prior art are successfully patentend. And are successfully enforced, because it is cheaper to pay the troll to cross the bridge than to take it to court. It isn't until the sue the wrong person who has the backbone and the resources to contest it that the patent gets revoked.
What's the use for this, you just tell your AI to build something that does the job without infringing the patent, make no mistakes.
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
that is just ipc
AI companies business model is that peasants don’t have intellectual property. Everyone who contributed to this filing should be publicly spat upon and shunned.
So without sandbox: it doesn't apply. Without explicit tool approval step: it doesn't apply. Response in xml: it doesn't apply.
What is the point?
I come up with at least two ideas like this every time I sit down in the toilet to poop.
One could also have their preferred AI draft + deploy the white paper prior to flush.
This is just an RPC with JSON being passed around like a messaging system.
So we are just vibe patenting rubbish and rebranding it with AI?
> 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.
Patenting is itself rubbish.
It's closer to a trojan horse talking to its C&C server than a typical RPC scenario.
In particular it's the server telling the client to execute arbitrary code in response to a request from the client.
Never liked the French..
I'd like to patent the term "disadvertisement" and use this as a prime example.