WIPO Report: China at the Forefront of Global Patenting Activity in GenAI

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) recently published a patent landscape report on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). The report builds on the 2019 WIPO Technology Trends publication on AI and provides observations on patenting activity and scientific publications in the field of GenAI, alongside insights into its future applications and potential impact.

"Generative artificial intelligence" is defined by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as "a technology that can create content, including text, images, audio, or video, when prompted by a user". It is typically used to translate text, generate images, summarise text or answer questions.

As noted in the report, in 2023, there were 14,080 GenAI patent family publications compared to about 230,000 AI patent family publications in total. And in the 10-year period between 2014 and 2023, 54,358 patent families were published in the field of GenAI.

Between 2014 and 2023, China's GenAI patent applications exceeded 38,000, ranking first in the world, 6 times that of the second-ranked United States, which was followed by South Korea, Japan, and India. The top 10 patent applicants with the most patents in GenAI were Tencent, Ping An Insurance Group, Baidu, Chinese Academy of Sciences, IBM, Alibaba Group, Samsung Electronics, Alphabet/Google, ByteDance and Microsoft, six of which being Chinese companies.

In terms of types of data used in GenAI patents, images/video; text; and speech/voice/music were the top three modes being patented between 2014 and 2023, and the key application areas for GenAI patents during the 10-year period included life sciences, document management and publishing, business solutions, industry and manufacturing, transportation, security and telecommunications.