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Update: The story was updated using WIPO’s press release.
China-based inventors have filed the highest number of generative AI patents as the country submitted six times more patents than the nearest competitor, the U.S., according to U.N. data.
Patent filings related to Generative AI saw about 54,000 applications submitted in the decade through 2023, with more than 25% were filed in 2023 itself, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO, report.
Over 38,000 Generative AI inventions submissions came from China between 2014-2023 compared to 6,276 filed by the U.S. across the same period, WIPO noted.
The agency noted that GenAI patents currently only represent 6% of all AI patents globally.
South Korea came in third followed by Japan and then India, with India growing at the fastest rate, according to the data.
The top 10 GenAI patent applicants were: Tencent (OTCPK:TCEHY) (OTCPK:TCTZF) (2,074 inventions), Ping An Insurance (OTCPK:PIAIF) (OTCPK:PNGAY) (1,564 inventions), Baidu (BIDU) (1,234 inventions), Chinese Academy of Sciences (607), IBM (IBM) (601), Alibaba (BABA) (571), Samsung Electronics (OTCPK:SSNLF) (468), Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL) (443), TikTok owner ByteDance (BDNCE) (418), and Microsoft (MSFT) (377), which has backed ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
GenAI patents span across a range of sectors, including in life sciences (5,346 inventions), document management and publishing (4,976 inventions) and over 2,000 inventions in each of business solutions, industry and manufacturing, transportation, security, and telecommunications, the report noted.
WIPO added that in the future, GenAI can help design new molecules, expediting drug development.
Generative AI services have taken the world by storm since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. Globally, companies have launched their own large language models, or LLMs, which can provide services such as content, image, video and voice generation, to name a few.
Alibaba’s (BABA) Qwen2.5, Tongyi Qianwen 2.0, and Tongyi Wanxiang, Baidu’s (BIDU) Ernie Bot and Tencent’s Hunyuan are some of the LLMs, among the many, being developed.