Infographic – Chinese Companies Lead in A.I. Patents

Click on image for full-size view (Statista)

28 Jan. 2023. Artificial intelligence is becoming an ever-larger presence in our daily and business lives, as well as capturing popular attention with the Chat GPT chatbot by OpenAI. The intellectual property behind A.I. is also growing, as seen in the chart published on Thursday by business research company Statista.

Data in the chart are compiled by PatentSight, a service of LexisNexis, that show the seven leading holders of machine learning and other A.I. patents by company in 2017 and 2021. The numbers indicate patent families, collections of related patents, not individual patents. As of 2021, the leading A.I. patent holders are technology giants Tencent and Baidu, based in China, both with more than 9,500 patent families. The Chinese financial services company Ping An ranks fifth with more than 6.400 patent families. In all three companies, the number of A.I. patent holdings grew rapidly between 2017 and 2021.

The American tech company I.B.M. ranks third with 7,343 A.I. patent families, followed by Korean company Samsung with nearly 6,900 patent collections. American enterprises Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, rank sixth and seventh, with respectively 5,821 and 4,068 A.I. patent families. In 2017, Microsoft, an investor in OpenAI, led all companies with 4,373 A.I. patent families.

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Disclosure: The author owns shares in I.B.M.

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