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.
I’m happy for the author, but I feel like that blog post kind of supports parent commenter’s argument. It sounds like Slug would’ve been created even if patents were not a thing. They had their own use case for it, and that usecase alone was enough for the R&D investment. So patents did not encourage innovation in this case.
In e.g. medicine, not having patents could arguably mean that companies don’t do as much R&D.
I'd argue that how they should have been, but the reality is quite the opposite. The patent framework is all about novel ideas rather than costly research, even though ideas aren't any valuable anymore - the easy stuff that is cheap to reproduce once the idea is known is already discovered.
Multimedia codecs and similar stuff are pretty patent-worthy (costly research) but their value is an exponential function of their adoption, and hence the unencumbered one always wins. Same with basically everything else.
I'm skeptical of non-software patents as well. So much R&D are funded by taxpayer money yet private companies monopolize the profits. Patents are supposed to keep valuable knowledge public, yet that's not what happens because the primary motivation for patent applicants is to squash competition and they have an incentive to keep key information out. It seems all patents are doing is to make lives harder for the common people.
A teammate put my name on a patent proposal he filed with our legal team. I immediately demanded to have my name taken off of it. No way I would accept having my name associated with that trash. I'm sorry you weren't able to get out of it.
A friend that has a degree in engineering and law who works as a patent lawyer had this to say.
Interesting physical real world problems are NP hard. That's why we have patents. Software? You can work backwards from the requirements to multiple solutions almost always. Which is why patents on software are stupid.
Copyrights are originally to protect authors because an author might create a few dozen works over a lifetime. Of which a few mich actually be worth anything. Copyrights were to protect his income and allow him to leave an inheritance behind.
Copyrights for software is stupid because most of it is mechanically generated and it goes old like last weeks fish. Quote: The source code for Windows 3.1 who cares.
I think the point is more that the patent office has been too broad with issuing software patents. I'm sure some are reasonable, but many are "obvious to someone skilled in the art" and should not have been issued.
You make an argument for patents not existing then, certainly they should not exist for more than 5 years, you should have exploited your discovery by then and competition is fine.
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.
If it's really for defense you don't have to go to the expense of patenting stuff, disclosure is enough. IBM used to publish Technical Disclosure Bulletins (TDB) - I assume for patent defence.
China has basically no domestic patent litigation. The way you stop the litigation is to just remove the legal rights associated with patents. Let everything become a free for all. China is just lapping everyone else right now. The lack of strong IP rights is not hurting them. Companies over there are not suffering due to not being able to invest in technology. They invest despite not having strong IP protections. Not because they have strong IP protections. And they know they can't get a monopoly with a piece of paperwork ... a patent. So they continue to innovate at a breakneck pace just to stay ahead of everyone else.
America needs to learn how to evolve our system of industrial production. Our society of lawyers and paperpushers is going to get annihilated in the next ten years at this rate.
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've said this before, but if we look critically, we would realize copyright is an inappropriate legal protection mechanism for software. Indeed, copyright protection for software is a historical hack because people didn’t want to figure out an appropriate legal framework from scratch. You “wrote” books, you "wrote" code, let’s shoehorn software into copyright and go get lunch!
However this completely overlooks the fact that the true value of software, and theoretically what we should protect, is not the code, but the functionality it provides. Copyright explicitly does not cover functional elements -- that is the realm of patents -- and really only covers code to the extent that it has "expressive elements." Technical creativity (novel algorithms, data structures, architecture etc.) is expressly excluded.
One non-obvious and absurd implication of this is that any code that can be shown to be purely dictated by technical constraints is not protected -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction%E2%80%93filtration... via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Associates_Internatio.... -- yet a simple rewrite using equivalent code constructs, like using a while-loop instead of a for-loop, can be enough to keep a snippet of code from infringing the original. (I'm oversimplifying of course, but principally this is how the law is.)
If you look back at significant copyright-related cases for software now (e.g. CA vs Altai above or Oracle vs Google), you'll realize they have twisted themselves into knots trying to apply laws intended for expressive creativity to issues that were essentially about technical creativity.
So copyright covers pretty much the literal code, and the compiled software as a "derivative work", and nothing more. Things only happened to work so far because reverse engineering and re-implementation was expensive.
But as comments in this thread are pointing it out, AI is making it very stark that the code itself matters very little. We're just now realizing how ineffective copyright has always been for code.
I have no hopes that we will figure out an appropriate IP framework for software, so I expect people will move towards other things like patents, trade secrets and trademarks. Which have their own problems, but at least they already exist and are more suitable than copyright, especially in the age of AI.
>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?
Yes. And that was exactly my point. If an idea is just an idea that anyone can have under the shower, there is no value to society in granting a monopoly to that idea. There was no cost to said idea. In that case is better for society to grant a monopoly on a particular expression of that idea (an implementation).
If that idea had cost (say) a billion dollars (like in some medical research or physical research), there absolutely is value in granting a temporary monopoly in order to encourage such research in the future.
Are you saying Mistral didn't invest a lot of money in discovering the invention this patent covers? I'd bet they'd say otherwise. How is the patent office supposed to tell the difference?
I don't think a "pay-to-play" system works. There's already trade secrets that allow corporations to invest lots of money in protecting things that aren't even inventions. You just seem like you're trying to figure which patents are good or bad. But if a patent is widely infringed, by the same kind of logic, it must have tremendous value as an invention.
Beyond that, it's a trivial batching pattern. Any remotely competent systems engineer developing an agent would immediately reach for it, it's the most basic tool in the toolbox to deal with latency. If Mistral "invested a lot of money in discovering" this, man I'm in the wrong line of work.
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.
I think what GP is saying is that, upon Fraunhofer's licensing of their technologies to Thomson, Thomson demanded (perhaps contractually) that Fraunhofer defend their patents so that Thomson could actually "get something" for having licensed those patents.
This is pretty common when a company exclusively licenses a patent: they demand that the patent holder sue anyone using the tech who isn't them, so that they actually benefit in the market from the exclusivity. Without that enforcement, the money they were paying for exclusivity would be for nothing.
Thomson just made this kind of arrangement in the context of a non-exclusive license — getting Fraunhofer to start legally enforcing their patent rights at all, so that Thomson and whoever else licenses Fraunhofer's patents could benefit in the market from having licensed the patents, by ensuring that non-licensees aren't getting to use the patented tech for free.
In the US, such an arrangement is unnecessary (to the point that it might be causing a miscommunication in this conversation!), since patent holders tend to legally protect their patents all on their own, suing non-licensees for use of the patented tech even when there are no licensees demanding to "get the benefit they paid for." In Europe, patents aren't sued over by default, with enforcement instead only beginning when the patent is licensed and the licensee demands enforcement so that they can benefit.
> 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.
I mean they have a healthy dollop of US VC private investment, so good guys is off the cards - but in relative terms, they seem to follow the law, which in Silicon Valley is certainly not a given.
/r/ChatGPT (or HN) since about 4-6 months after ChatGPT was released?
Tool calls were immediately obvious, and everyone and their dog was doing their own hacky version of it (today we call it "harness engineering") for a good year before OpenAI wrapped it up in an API.
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".
It’s old memories from the engineering school in Europe but I remember that a patent office is about collecting fees and documents, and won’t do any actual checks on the patents validities.
Some countries don't examine patents for validity, some don't search prior art but leave it to the applicant. But plenty of countries do check for validity - including USA.
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.
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.
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.
I took Claude Code with the prompt copied from GP, and threw it at a repo that's just a collection of ad-hoc narrow-purpose single-page HTML tools, all of them vibecoded on the fly. It found four things "it would show the patent attorney" and three more under liberal interpretation of "novel".
Notable inventions include:
1. Taking well-known math for trilateration, but putting it inside a phone app and making it ergonomic to use. I vibed it so I can survey a plot quickly using a hand laser ranger and a foldable phone for data entry; apparently, the novelty is in combining the live display of how the measurements resolve to a 2D structure, with error residual, and a list of additional measurements to make, priority-sorted by how much error can be removed by making it. Apparently it's "closing the loop from adjustment back to "what should I physically measure next."" (and yes, it in fact does that, and works well).
2. A shader doing "resolution-independent procedural texturing of a hyperbolic ground plane". Basically the result of me asking "I want something like Hyperbolica to play with on my phone, now now now", followed by "cool but it got ugly tessellation artifacts far from origin". I'm not qualified to judge whether this is in any way not obvious, but Claude is framing this as "specific technical solution to a specific floating-point problem, which is exactly the flavor of thing that survives §101 scrutiny best".
3. There's one I'm afraid to even describe because it has to do with UX of VLMs and that could make it novel enough somebody will patent it. But to hell with it: basically, take an image annotator (draw colored rectangles on an image), allow user to label the rectangles in the interface, and then save, alongside the image, a file mapping colors to labels. This was my idea to avoid having to write stuff like "that red thing is XYZ" and "the purple rectangles are VWX". Pretty obvious UX streamlining that's one of many that apparently no major AI provider thought of yet...
--
1. is a shared invention - me pushing for ergonomics, LLM figuring out the "game loop". 2. was Claude Fable all on its own - I just told it it's ugly and looks like the kind of nonsense you get at the poles of a globe made of triangle strips, and it came up with the shader. 3. was my idea from the start.
Question to patent people: are things like this really patentable? I hope not...
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.
> 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.
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.
it makes perfect sense. inventions implementing some abstract concept thats already known with prior art (like your rejected patent) cant really count as novel.
otherwise an evil law firm could spam adaptations of your idea to every relevant industry and get rights over your invention without your consent. that would be a complete perversion of what the patent system is supposed to do.
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.
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.
> what is the point of a patent if not to enforce the right of exclusivity it grants
Usually it's to defend against another company using a "blocking patent" by pursuing you for infringing their patent which is built upon the thing you patented, doing the next step which was always obvious to you.
So that you can continue building what you started in the first place, instead of being shut down while someone else takes your idea forward.
>Usually it's to defend against another company using a "blocking patent" by pursuing you for infringing their patent which is built upon the thing you patented, doing the next step which was always obvious to you.
Would be pretty hard to sue someone for practicing a patent that cites that person in prior art who concurrently was inventing the same thing and would say how obvious it ones. You're going to tell me it's not so easy, but you completely made up some really narrow and specific situation anyway...
>Not for exclusivity.
It's only your right to exclude others from it that gives a patent any defense... it's all about exclusivity. That's the fundamental nature of property law.
I've been in several patent lawyer meetings where we discussed blocking patent strategies and their mitigation when deciding what to patent, so I don't think it's made up.
Company A publishes invention 1, when they know inventions 2, 3, 4 follow naturally in their own roadmap but those things aren't obvious to other people yet. Invention 1 is just a stepping stone in company A's larger vision, and it's not useful by itself, but they can't publish (or patent) everything at once, it takes time to develop them. It's also not permitted to patent 4 inventions in one patent. There are time, expense and R&D factors.
Company B studies invention 1, realises invention 2 follows naturally (as does everyone who looks at invention 1), and company B patents invention 2 before anyone else.
They can do this because inventions 2, 3, 4 are not obvious to persons skilled in the art who haven't seen invention 1. They are only obvious to anyone who works with invention 1.
The standard is not "if you knew about invention 1, would 2 be an obvious next step", it's "would 2 be obvious with general industry knowledge alone".
When that happens company A is stuck, whether they patented invention 1 or just published and/or used it.
With their prior art, they can continue to use invention 1, even if they didn't patent it, but it's not much use by itself. They can't develop it further in the directions they'd had in mind all along. And sometimes company B's patent and company A's prior art will mean company A can continue to use invention 1 but nobody else can.
A defensive strategy is for company A to patent invention 1, even if they hate patents, just so that company B can't use invention 1 when they need it in invention 2. This doesn't stop company B from patenting invention 2 before company A, by the way. It just creates leverage for company A to persuade company B to license invention 2, instead of company A having to abandon its entire roadmap and switch to a different kind of product.
> I's only your right to exclude others from it that gives a patent any defense... it's all about exclusivity
Yes, but not all companies want to exclude. Some even want to share their work openly as they proceed. But even sharing openly and creating prior art as you go is not safe.
The natural line of development they have mapped out can be shut down by others seeing the way ahead and blocking it, which is a strategy, as I said, that I have seen discussed in real patent lawyer meetings.
For those companies, "what is the point of a patent if not to enforce the right of exclusivity it grants" -> the point is not to enforce exclusivity over anyone, because they don't want to. It's to use the granted rights as defensive leverage so they can continue developing, publishing and using their own work.
You can't patent something that is already published - and, again, if you are already researching whatever step 2, that is great evidence to invalidate the step 2 patent made by another company. So, again, your scenario is highly specific, and also made up in that it is some hypothetical that exists in your mind and you are not pointing to any actual patents or examples of this happening that we could discuss with any specificity.
>Yes, but not all companies want to exclude. Some even want to share their work openly as they proceed. But even sharing openly and creating prior art as you go is not safe.
That's great, patents are publicly available documents. So patentees can feel free to share!
>For those companies, "what is the point of a patent if not to enforce the right of exclusivity it grants" -> the point is not to enforce exclusivity over anyone, because they don't want to. It's to use the granted rights as defensive leverage so they can continue developing, publishing and using their own work.
You're just making some semantic point for a reason I cannot understand. Patents only give the right of exclusion, what a patentee does with that right is up to them... They can trade on it, use it to bargain, give it up, whatever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some confusion in this thread... this is not a patent application. This is a fully granted patent. Looks like they fast-tracked it. Filed application in March, granted in June.
Oh wow :D Not commenting on the larger picture of why or why not Mistral might be doing that, but commenting on the idea itself:
I plan to build my own harness soon, and one of its core tenants was, from the beginning, that it would parse every tool call the LLM attempts and executes them itself. I most cases, that would mean to delegate to one of the tools of the rust coreutils, or making a call to a LSP server.
My reasoning:
- That way I will have maximum control over how the LLM can interact with the world (i.e. I can even narrow down which arguments I support/not support)
- The monitoring story should be great as well, since every interaction with the outside world happens at one place only
- I can add functionality as I go, and can understand how the harness changes and why it does what it does from the ground up
The biggest challenge I foresee is with the LLMs making tool calls and having them react to the results. I also wonder how far I will even get with this :D
Back to topic; "code implemented tool calls" is basically my "oh yeah my harness can do tool calls too" (and everything I need is implemented in one codebase, in... code)
For anyone, like me, who is/was confused by the patent diagram and labeling, the initial arrows labelled "tool call execution request" (client->server) and "tool calls" (server->LLM) seem to be confusingly labelled. This isn't a tool call being sent from client, via server, to LLM (which is not a thing - tool calls go in the opposite direction), but rather the user/agent's prompt, which as always includes tool "declarations", being sent from agent, via server, to the LLM.
The big picture here is that overall tool call flow works as normal, but rather than the LLM just generating tool calls, it is instead generating a "code block" that may include multiple tool calls/invocations. The server (between LLM and client) receives this code block and will execute it, but first has to execute any contained tool calls, some which it may do locally, and some via calls back to the client/agent as normal. Once all tools calls and the containing code block have been executed by the server (in a sandbox), then the final result is sent back to the client.
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").
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.
The Scala[1] community has been working[2] on something similar for a couple of years now, with papers already published[3]. I wonder if Mistral is not just trying to steal this work.
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.
For a big tech the publishing fees are nothing in comparison to what they can revenue on patents. Let's say that they AI generate 1000 patents and let's say the cost is 1000$ for each one, it's sufficient that only 1 of them are usable in a court case to sue a company for millions to make it worth it.
Publishing ideas online doesn't really matter, a big company can sue you and you have already lost, because you don't have the money to pay lawyers to defend you, even if you are in right.
There is no justice in our system, unfortunately who owns the money just rules. We don't live in a democracy, we live in something that is not much different of medieval feudalism, possibly much worse indeed.
Regular PSA for patent-related discussions: what matters is the claims, so before commenting one should read those.
Also this is a patent application, so it has not been examined yet. The claims at this point will always be over-broad, because that's just how patent prosecution works: the applicant (brazenly) tries to stake out as much "intellectual territory" as possible (because why not!) but the patent authorities will push back to the extent it does not overlap with other existing "territories" i.e. prior art. The applicant then narrows their claims and the back-and-forth continues until the authority determines that the claims are indeed novel and non-obvious enough to be granted. Every alternate back-and-forth costs $$ and time, which incentivizes applicants to make reasonable claims.
A typical way this negotiation often proceeds is that the applicant starts with a couple of the broadest claims they think reasonable and add multiple narrowing claims (or "dependent" claims) that cover narrower and narrower functionalities, essentially a dependency tree of claims.
This is because the examiner must judge each claim on its own merits, so while the broader claims could get knocked out, the narrower claims could survive and can indicate which "territory" is still unclaimed. The applicant can then focus on that (e.g. by making it part of the root independent claim.)
So often what is interesting in patent applicitations are the dependent claims.
For this patent, the current primary claim literally covers the concept of a tool call by an LLM, and as comments point out, this is ridiculously broad and will get knocked out by prior art. But the dependent claims are intriguing.
A quick glance at those indicates that Mistral thinks the more novel or non-obvious aspects are a "stateless resumable sandbox" which works by executing the generated code until a "non-deterministic operation" (like a random number or a date) and on getting the result of that operation replaying all the code that executed up until that point. The results of previous such operations are cached for reuse in subsequent re-executions.
Now I'm not at all knowledgeable about this area, but I did write a very rudimentary tool-calling LLM harness at one point, and offhand I would now have considered this approach -- re-executing the same code multiple times just seems wasteful and unnecessary. But the specification points out there are other considerations at play in more complex situations, so maybe this is narrower and more interesting than what the title and top claim indicates.
WTF! I just looked at the filing date of March 2026 and assumed this was still an application! I realize now that even for a patent application it had published too early, since they usually get published 18 months after filing.
Turns out it was fast-tracked, which is why it was issued in ~2 months. It does claim priority to an earlier filing so the invention date is indeed March 2006. Not a single claim was questioned or rejected, it went straight to grant!
Yeah, unless I'm misreading claim 1, it seems iffy. From a quick glance at the spec, maybe the novel part is that all tool calls are executed in the sandboxed code block, thus keeping the intermediate results from polluting the context. But I'm not sure if that's different from existing systems like LangChain.
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.
You mean to create the invention? I think most jurisdictions have settled on 'use of ML tools is fine, you just need to name the user of the tool as inventor'. Invalidating a patent on the basis that the named inventor used ML tools doesn't seem like it will work.
Do you know of a jurisdiction that disallows inventions generated with "AI"?
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.
This is not at all true, [non-final] rejections are very common. Not only for reasons relating to the the form of an application but also due to lack of novelty or inventiveness (35 USC 102, 103).
The US industry players are unconcerned. Mistral wouldn't be stupid enough to use this patent against them, because they know damn well they'd lose, and then have their patent invalidated. No, more likely Mistral is planning on using this patent as a cudgel against small start-ups and open-weight models, who don't have the resources to fight back effectively. Which is good for Anthropic/"Open"AI.
I don't see anything unique nor novel to what everyone has been doing since GPT-3.5, before OpenAI introduced function calling, I was building my own JSON and tool calling.
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)
Software is mathematics. The idea you can patent software is as ridiculous as patenting a particular number or the technique of Riemann integration or whatever. I have my name on a couple of software patents[1] and everything about the process is bullshit. When I read my first patent I couldn’t quite believe that this is an accepted legal process. The actual arguably novel part is one page surrounded by hundreds of pages of fiction pretending my thing was a machine to try to game the patent system. It is like the sovereign citizen BS but made real.
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
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.
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.
If you are a software developer and you sell your time and IP for money to employers. I highly recommend not looking at patents if you don't want to reduce your market price by introducing the liability of patent infringement. Especially don't publicly comment about the patent, there's almost no upside.
The idea of patents is not to read a feed of the new ones and to discuss them as innovations, it's for the patent holders to use as proof in the future that they had already thought about a thing. The best strategy, in any case, is to publish your own patents, or to document your inventions privately or through your own public channels. Such that in the future IF you are sued for patent infringement, you can prove you didn't arrive at your IP by stealing theirs.
So the European poster child AI company is now doing something that smells of patent trolling? Gee, Europe really isn't helping its image of a society obsessed with lawfare.
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.
I’m happy for the author, but I feel like that blog post kind of supports parent commenter’s argument. It sounds like Slug would’ve been created even if patents were not a thing. They had their own use case for it, and that usecase alone was enough for the R&D investment. So patents did not encourage innovation in this case. In e.g. medicine, not having patents could arguably mean that companies don’t do as much R&D.
> Patents are designed to protect costly research
I'd argue that how they should have been, but the reality is quite the opposite. The patent framework is all about novel ideas rather than costly research, even though ideas aren't any valuable anymore - the easy stuff that is cheap to reproduce once the idea is known is already discovered.
Multimedia codecs and similar stuff are pretty patent-worthy (costly research) but their value is an exponential function of their adoption, and hence the unencumbered one always wins. Same with basically everything else.
Copyrights for protecting software seems likely to die on the altar of LLMs. It seems likely patents will become more important.
I hope not. That will just encourage more lawfare and market consolidation instead of competition and innovation
Hey, we can also expect LLMs to clog the wheels of the USPTO with patentslop so at least we've got that going for us.
I'm skeptical of non-software patents as well. So much R&D are funded by taxpayer money yet private companies monopolize the profits. Patents are supposed to keep valuable knowledge public, yet that's not what happens because the primary motivation for patent applicants is to squash competition and they have an incentive to keep key information out. It seems all patents are doing is to make lives harder for the common people.
A teammate put my name on a patent proposal he filed with our legal team. I immediately demanded to have my name taken off of it. No way I would accept having my name associated with that trash. I'm sorry you weren't able to get out of it.
A friend that has a degree in engineering and law who works as a patent lawyer had this to say.
Interesting physical real world problems are NP hard. That's why we have patents. Software? You can work backwards from the requirements to multiple solutions almost always. Which is why patents on software are stupid.
Copyrights are originally to protect authors because an author might create a few dozen works over a lifetime. Of which a few mich actually be worth anything. Copyrights were to protect his income and allow him to leave an inheritance behind.
Copyrights for software is stupid because most of it is mechanically generated and it goes old like last weeks fish. Quote: The source code for Windows 3.1 who cares.
i'm okay with participating in the software patent system for defensive purposes, but agreed that it is very stupid.
> That's where the cost is
That's where the cost <was>
I think with LLM, implementation winning is moot now.
I disagree. If patents are to exist there is no reason software that should be an exception.
Us programmers are essentially arranging blocks. And if you arrange them in a special way you can get your stylus to follow them in amazing ways.
I don’t see why that’s very different than arranging atoms.
At the lowest level, software is always represented physically in the medium. It’s concrete.
I think the point is more that the patent office has been too broad with issuing software patents. I'm sure some are reasonable, but many are "obvious to someone skilled in the art" and should not have been issued.
You make an argument for patents not existing then, certainly they should not exist for more than 5 years, you should have exploited your discovery by then and competition is fine.
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.
If it's really for defense you don't have to go to the expense of patenting stuff, disclosure is enough. IBM used to publish Technical Disclosure Bulletins (TDB) - I assume for patent defence.
Alas, that only ensures that you cannot be sued for the disclosed invention. You cannot use it to counter-sue and reach a settlement.
I do not like it one bit, but that does seem to be state of the software world right now.
China has basically no domestic patent litigation. The way you stop the litigation is to just remove the legal rights associated with patents. Let everything become a free for all. China is just lapping everyone else right now. The lack of strong IP rights is not hurting them. Companies over there are not suffering due to not being able to invest in technology. They invest despite not having strong IP protections. Not because they have strong IP protections. And they know they can't get a monopoly with a piece of paperwork ... a patent. So they continue to innovate at a breakneck pace just to stay ahead of everyone else.
America needs to learn how to evolve our system of industrial production. Our society of lawyers and paperpushers is going to get annihilated in the next ten years at this rate.
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.
I've said this before, but if we look critically, we would realize copyright is an inappropriate legal protection mechanism for software. Indeed, copyright protection for software is a historical hack because people didn’t want to figure out an appropriate legal framework from scratch. You “wrote” books, you "wrote" code, let’s shoehorn software into copyright and go get lunch!
However this completely overlooks the fact that the true value of software, and theoretically what we should protect, is not the code, but the functionality it provides. Copyright explicitly does not cover functional elements -- that is the realm of patents -- and really only covers code to the extent that it has "expressive elements." Technical creativity (novel algorithms, data structures, architecture etc.) is expressly excluded.
One non-obvious and absurd implication of this is that any code that can be shown to be purely dictated by technical constraints is not protected -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction%E2%80%93filtration... via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Associates_Internatio.... -- yet a simple rewrite using equivalent code constructs, like using a while-loop instead of a for-loop, can be enough to keep a snippet of code from infringing the original. (I'm oversimplifying of course, but principally this is how the law is.)
If you look back at significant copyright-related cases for software now (e.g. CA vs Altai above or Oracle vs Google), you'll realize they have twisted themselves into knots trying to apply laws intended for expressive creativity to issues that were essentially about technical creativity.
So copyright covers pretty much the literal code, and the compiled software as a "derivative work", and nothing more. Things only happened to work so far because reverse engineering and re-implementation was expensive.
But as comments in this thread are pointing it out, AI is making it very stark that the code itself matters very little. We're just now realizing how ineffective copyright has always been for code.
I have no hopes that we will figure out an appropriate IP framework for software, so I expect people will move towards other things like patents, trade secrets and trademarks. Which have their own problems, but at least they already exist and are more suitable than copyright, especially in the age of AI.
>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?
Yes. And that was exactly my point. If an idea is just an idea that anyone can have under the shower, there is no value to society in granting a monopoly to that idea. There was no cost to said idea. In that case is better for society to grant a monopoly on a particular expression of that idea (an implementation).
If that idea had cost (say) a billion dollars (like in some medical research or physical research), there absolutely is value in granting a temporary monopoly in order to encourage such research in the future.
Are you saying Mistral didn't invest a lot of money in discovering the invention this patent covers? I'd bet they'd say otherwise. How is the patent office supposed to tell the difference?
I don't think a "pay-to-play" system works. There's already trade secrets that allow corporations to invest lots of money in protecting things that aren't even inventions. You just seem like you're trying to figure which patents are good or bad. But if a patent is widely infringed, by the same kind of logic, it must have tremendous value as an invention.
The "invention" was first published in 2024, by Chinese researchers: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01030
Beyond that, it's a trivial batching pattern. Any remotely competent systems engineer developing an agent would immediately reach for it, it's the most basic tool in the toolbox to deal with latency. If Mistral "invested a lot of money in discovering" this, man I'm in the wrong line of work.
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.
> So they fill in a patent for "XX implemented on a hardware operating on land, in the air, in space, on, or under water.".
I'm glad my servers are operating in a deep undersea cave.
> operating on land, in the air, in space, on, or under water
Thunderbirds are Go!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_mBUaPsX6o
That sounds like patent trolls shenanigans.
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.
I think what GP is saying is that, upon Fraunhofer's licensing of their technologies to Thomson, Thomson demanded (perhaps contractually) that Fraunhofer defend their patents so that Thomson could actually "get something" for having licensed those patents.
This is pretty common when a company exclusively licenses a patent: they demand that the patent holder sue anyone using the tech who isn't them, so that they actually benefit in the market from the exclusivity. Without that enforcement, the money they were paying for exclusivity would be for nothing.
Thomson just made this kind of arrangement in the context of a non-exclusive license — getting Fraunhofer to start legally enforcing their patent rights at all, so that Thomson and whoever else licenses Fraunhofer's patents could benefit in the market from having licensed the patents, by ensuring that non-licensees aren't getting to use the patented tech for free.
In the US, such an arrangement is unnecessary (to the point that it might be causing a miscommunication in this conversation!), since patent holders tend to legally protect their patents all on their own, suing non-licensees for use of the patented tech even when there are no licensees demanding to "get the benefit they paid for." In Europe, patents aren't sued over by default, with enforcement instead only beginning when the patent is licensed and the licensee demands enforcement so that they can benefit.
> 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.
Even if it’s good now, three to five years down the line there’s a 50% chance it’s sold for scraps and this may end up in the hands of a patent troll.
I mean they have a healthy dollop of US VC private investment, so good guys is off the cards - but in relative terms, they seem to follow the law, which in Silicon Valley is certainly not a given.
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/
/r/ChatGPT (or HN) since about 4-6 months after ChatGPT was released?
Tool calls were immediately obvious, and everyone and their dog was doing their own hacky version of it (today we call it "harness engineering") for a good year before OpenAI wrapped it up in an API.
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.
It’s old memories from the engineering school in Europe but I remember that a patent office is about collecting fees and documents, and won’t do any actual checks on the patents validities.
Whether a patent is valid is tested in court.
Some countries don't examine patents for validity, some don't search prior art but leave it to the applicant. But plenty of countries do check for validity - including USA.
Interesting. They obviously don’t check very well if they do.
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).
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
Isn't that patent similar to CodeAct [1], originally described in this paper [2]?
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/agent-framework/agents/cod...
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01030
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).
In applications before the USPTO anyone can submit preissuance observations, afair, https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s1134.html
The submitter needs to be identified, so get a friend/representative to submit if you want to maintain anonymity.
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?
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.
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...
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.
I took Claude Code with the prompt copied from GP, and threw it at a repo that's just a collection of ad-hoc narrow-purpose single-page HTML tools, all of them vibecoded on the fly. It found four things "it would show the patent attorney" and three more under liberal interpretation of "novel".
Notable inventions include:
1. Taking well-known math for trilateration, but putting it inside a phone app and making it ergonomic to use. I vibed it so I can survey a plot quickly using a hand laser ranger and a foldable phone for data entry; apparently, the novelty is in combining the live display of how the measurements resolve to a 2D structure, with error residual, and a list of additional measurements to make, priority-sorted by how much error can be removed by making it. Apparently it's "closing the loop from adjustment back to "what should I physically measure next."" (and yes, it in fact does that, and works well).
2. A shader doing "resolution-independent procedural texturing of a hyperbolic ground plane". Basically the result of me asking "I want something like Hyperbolica to play with on my phone, now now now", followed by "cool but it got ugly tessellation artifacts far from origin". I'm not qualified to judge whether this is in any way not obvious, but Claude is framing this as "specific technical solution to a specific floating-point problem, which is exactly the flavor of thing that survives §101 scrutiny best".
3. There's one I'm afraid to even describe because it has to do with UX of VLMs and that could make it novel enough somebody will patent it. But to hell with it: basically, take an image annotator (draw colored rectangles on an image), allow user to label the rectangles in the interface, and then save, alongside the image, a file mapping colors to labels. This was my idea to avoid having to write stuff like "that red thing is XYZ" and "the purple rectangles are VWX". Pretty obvious UX streamlining that's one of many that apparently no major AI provider thought of yet...
--
1. is a shared invention - me pushing for ergonomics, LLM figuring out the "game loop". 2. was Claude Fable all on its own - I just told it it's ugly and looks like the kind of nonsense you get at the poles of a globe made of triangle strips, and it came up with the shader. 3. was my idea from the start.
Question to patent people: are things like this really patentable? I hope not...
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.
> 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
Sure, why not make it more difficult, then?
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.
it makes perfect sense. inventions implementing some abstract concept thats already known with prior art (like your rejected patent) cant really count as novel.
otherwise an evil law firm could spam adaptations of your idea to every relevant industry and get rights over your invention without your consent. that would be a complete perversion of what the patent system is supposed to do.
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 $
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.
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?
> what is the point of a patent if not to enforce the right of exclusivity it grants
Usually it's to defend against another company using a "blocking patent" by pursuing you for infringing their patent which is built upon the thing you patented, doing the next step which was always obvious to you.
So that you can continue building what you started in the first place, instead of being shut down while someone else takes your idea forward.
Not for exclusivity.
Not saying it is not used for this purpose, but this just proves how broken the system actually is.
>Usually it's to defend against another company using a "blocking patent" by pursuing you for infringing their patent which is built upon the thing you patented, doing the next step which was always obvious to you.
Would be pretty hard to sue someone for practicing a patent that cites that person in prior art who concurrently was inventing the same thing and would say how obvious it ones. You're going to tell me it's not so easy, but you completely made up some really narrow and specific situation anyway...
>Not for exclusivity.
It's only your right to exclude others from it that gives a patent any defense... it's all about exclusivity. That's the fundamental nature of property law.
I've been in several patent lawyer meetings where we discussed blocking patent strategies and their mitigation when deciding what to patent, so I don't think it's made up.
Company A publishes invention 1, when they know inventions 2, 3, 4 follow naturally in their own roadmap but those things aren't obvious to other people yet. Invention 1 is just a stepping stone in company A's larger vision, and it's not useful by itself, but they can't publish (or patent) everything at once, it takes time to develop them. It's also not permitted to patent 4 inventions in one patent. There are time, expense and R&D factors.
Company B studies invention 1, realises invention 2 follows naturally (as does everyone who looks at invention 1), and company B patents invention 2 before anyone else.
They can do this because inventions 2, 3, 4 are not obvious to persons skilled in the art who haven't seen invention 1. They are only obvious to anyone who works with invention 1.
The standard is not "if you knew about invention 1, would 2 be an obvious next step", it's "would 2 be obvious with general industry knowledge alone".
When that happens company A is stuck, whether they patented invention 1 or just published and/or used it.
With their prior art, they can continue to use invention 1, even if they didn't patent it, but it's not much use by itself. They can't develop it further in the directions they'd had in mind all along. And sometimes company B's patent and company A's prior art will mean company A can continue to use invention 1 but nobody else can.
A defensive strategy is for company A to patent invention 1, even if they hate patents, just so that company B can't use invention 1 when they need it in invention 2. This doesn't stop company B from patenting invention 2 before company A, by the way. It just creates leverage for company A to persuade company B to license invention 2, instead of company A having to abandon its entire roadmap and switch to a different kind of product.
> I's only your right to exclude others from it that gives a patent any defense... it's all about exclusivity
Yes, but not all companies want to exclude. Some even want to share their work openly as they proceed. But even sharing openly and creating prior art as you go is not safe.
The natural line of development they have mapped out can be shut down by others seeing the way ahead and blocking it, which is a strategy, as I said, that I have seen discussed in real patent lawyer meetings.
For those companies, "what is the point of a patent if not to enforce the right of exclusivity it grants" -> the point is not to enforce exclusivity over anyone, because they don't want to. It's to use the granted rights as defensive leverage so they can continue developing, publishing and using their own work.
You can't patent something that is already published - and, again, if you are already researching whatever step 2, that is great evidence to invalidate the step 2 patent made by another company. So, again, your scenario is highly specific, and also made up in that it is some hypothetical that exists in your mind and you are not pointing to any actual patents or examples of this happening that we could discuss with any specificity.
>Yes, but not all companies want to exclude. Some even want to share their work openly as they proceed. But even sharing openly and creating prior art as you go is not safe.
That's great, patents are publicly available documents. So patentees can feel free to share!
>For those companies, "what is the point of a patent if not to enforce the right of exclusivity it grants" -> the point is not to enforce exclusivity over anyone, because they don't want to. It's to use the granted rights as defensive leverage so they can continue developing, publishing and using their own work.
You're just making some semantic point for a reason I cannot understand. Patents only give the right of exclusion, what a patentee does with that right is up to them... They can trade on it, use it to bargain, give it up, whatever.
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.
> Yeah you're right, I was thinking of trademarks. I just think the system is very cumbersome and antiquated
It's always something like this, from someone who didn't even realize they weren't actually talking about patents in the first place.
That poster mixed it up with trademarks, for which enforcement is required to maintain its validity.
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.
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?
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.
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
They exist so you can not be forbidden to do what you invented.. but there might be unintended correlation ;)
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
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.
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.
What's absurd about a French company doing business in the US taking advantage of US law?
Some confusion in this thread... this is not a patent application. This is a fully granted patent. Looks like they fast-tracked it. Filed application in March, granted in June.
You can see the actual claims here: https://ibb.co/k2mVVkFN
You can find the full patent on the USPTO search site
https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/
search: "12670045".did
Oh wow :D Not commenting on the larger picture of why or why not Mistral might be doing that, but commenting on the idea itself: I plan to build my own harness soon, and one of its core tenants was, from the beginning, that it would parse every tool call the LLM attempts and executes them itself. I most cases, that would mean to delegate to one of the tools of the rust coreutils, or making a call to a LSP server.
My reasoning: - That way I will have maximum control over how the LLM can interact with the world (i.e. I can even narrow down which arguments I support/not support) - The monitoring story should be great as well, since every interaction with the outside world happens at one place only - I can add functionality as I go, and can understand how the harness changes and why it does what it does from the ground up
The biggest challenge I foresee is with the LLMs making tool calls and having them react to the results. I also wonder how far I will even get with this :D
Back to topic; "code implemented tool calls" is basically my "oh yeah my harness can do tool calls too" (and everything I need is implemented in one codebase, in... code)
For anyone, like me, who is/was confused by the patent diagram and labeling, the initial arrows labelled "tool call execution request" (client->server) and "tool calls" (server->LLM) seem to be confusingly labelled. This isn't a tool call being sent from client, via server, to LLM (which is not a thing - tool calls go in the opposite direction), but rather the user/agent's prompt, which as always includes tool "declarations", being sent from agent, via server, to the LLM.
The big picture here is that overall tool call flow works as normal, but rather than the LLM just generating tool calls, it is instead generating a "code block" that may include multiple tool calls/invocations. The server (between LLM and client) receives this code block and will execute it, but first has to execute any contained tool calls, some which it may do locally, and some via calls back to the client/agent as normal. Once all tools calls and the containing code block have been executed by the server (in a sandbox), then the final result is sent back to the client.
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").
Believe it or not, but law offices make heavy use of https://patents.google.com/
This is markedly better than the USPTO website, FWIW.
https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/ try this
This is the official search by the way for anybody wondering. It mirrors the internal examiner tool.
search: "12670045".did
EPO has Espacenet, which hasn't been mentioned yet. I find it the best of the free patent search tools, ymmv.
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.
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/)
Software patents are the same problem as letting Billionairs buy elections and influence policy. Its stupid.
The Scala[1] community has been working[2] on something similar for a couple of years now, with papers already published[3]. I wonder if Mistral is not just trying to steal this work.
[1] https://martinodersky.substack.com/p/tracked-capabilities-fo...
[2] https://github.com/lampepfl/tacit
[3] https://www.caisconf.org/program/2026/papers/securing-agents...
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...
For a big tech the publishing fees are nothing in comparison to what they can revenue on patents. Let's say that they AI generate 1000 patents and let's say the cost is 1000$ for each one, it's sufficient that only 1 of them are usable in a court case to sue a company for millions to make it worth it.
Publishing ideas online doesn't really matter, a big company can sue you and you have already lost, because you don't have the money to pay lawyers to defend you, even if you are in right.
There is no justice in our system, unfortunately who owns the money just rules. We don't live in a democracy, we live in something that is not much different of medieval feudalism, possibly much worse indeed.
Are you thinking of TDCommons? https://www.tdcommons.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_patent_aggregation
Regular PSA for patent-related discussions: what matters is the claims, so before commenting one should read those.
Also this is a patent application, so it has not been examined yet. The claims at this point will always be over-broad, because that's just how patent prosecution works: the applicant (brazenly) tries to stake out as much "intellectual territory" as possible (because why not!) but the patent authorities will push back to the extent it does not overlap with other existing "territories" i.e. prior art. The applicant then narrows their claims and the back-and-forth continues until the authority determines that the claims are indeed novel and non-obvious enough to be granted. Every alternate back-and-forth costs $$ and time, which incentivizes applicants to make reasonable claims.
A typical way this negotiation often proceeds is that the applicant starts with a couple of the broadest claims they think reasonable and add multiple narrowing claims (or "dependent" claims) that cover narrower and narrower functionalities, essentially a dependency tree of claims.
This is because the examiner must judge each claim on its own merits, so while the broader claims could get knocked out, the narrower claims could survive and can indicate which "territory" is still unclaimed. The applicant can then focus on that (e.g. by making it part of the root independent claim.)
So often what is interesting in patent applicitations are the dependent claims.
For this patent, the current primary claim literally covers the concept of a tool call by an LLM, and as comments point out, this is ridiculously broad and will get knocked out by prior art. But the dependent claims are intriguing.
A quick glance at those indicates that Mistral thinks the more novel or non-obvious aspects are a "stateless resumable sandbox" which works by executing the generated code until a "non-deterministic operation" (like a random number or a date) and on getting the result of that operation replaying all the code that executed up until that point. The results of previous such operations are cached for reuse in subsequent re-executions.
Now I'm not at all knowledgeable about this area, but I did write a very rudimentary tool-calling LLM harness at one point, and offhand I would now have considered this approach -- re-executing the same code multiple times just seems wasteful and unnecessary. But the specification points out there are other considerations at play in more complex situations, so maybe this is narrower and more interesting than what the title and top claim indicates.
This is not a patent application. This is granted. They applied in March and was fast-tracked & issued in June. This is a full grant.
You can see the claims here: https://ibb.co/k2mVVkFN
WTF! I just looked at the filing date of March 2026 and assumed this was still an application! I realize now that even for a patent application it had published too early, since they usually get published 18 months after filing.
Turns out it was fast-tracked, which is why it was issued in ~2 months. It does claim priority to an earlier filing so the invention date is indeed March 2006. Not a single claim was questioned or rejected, it went straight to grant!
Yeah, unless I'm misreading claim 1, it seems iffy. From a quick glance at the spec, maybe the novel part is that all tool calls are executed in the sandboxed code block, thus keeping the intermediate results from polluting the context. But I'm not sure if that's different from existing systems like LangChain.
That's exactly what Anthropic was doing for a while.
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use
The irony is that it's not probably not patentable in Europe.
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.
Can't beat them... litigate?
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'
What are the chances Mistral used AI for its patented technology, thereby potentially invaliding the claim?
You mean to create the invention? I think most jurisdictions have settled on 'use of ML tools is fine, you just need to name the user of the tool as inventor'. Invalidating a patent on the basis that the named inventor used ML tools doesn't seem like it will work.
Do you know of a jurisdiction that disallows inventions generated with "AI"?
Priority date of March 4 2026 and claims this patent is novel on that date, clearly trying it on. Hope it gets struck down.
Mistal transforms into a patent troll company? Patents organization is broken if it is possible to do
Typically, companies file these patents to protect themselves against patent trolls.
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.
This is not at all true, [non-final] rejections are very common. Not only for reasons relating to the the form of an application but also due to lack of novelty or inventiveness (35 USC 102, 103).
Then US industry players should give a mistral a call to shut this down before it can become a thing that can cause them issues!
The US industry players are unconcerned. Mistral wouldn't be stupid enough to use this patent against them, because they know damn well they'd lose, and then have their patent invalidated. No, more likely Mistral is planning on using this patent as a cudgel against small start-ups and open-weight models, who don't have the resources to fight back effectively. Which is good for Anthropic/"Open"AI.
TONS of prior art.
I don't see anything unique nor novel to what everyone has been doing since GPT-3.5, before OpenAI introduced function calling, I was building my own JSON and tool calling.
Let's find an LLM that was trained before the patent was filed. If it can come up with the idea, then it is trivial and the patent can be discarded.
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.
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)
There are many ways for a business to survive outside of innovation
what an insane thing to have a patent for.
Cocorico !! Well played Mistral ! Really funny since software patents does not exist in France ...
EU AI innovation is really amazing.
Can somebody care to explain if the 2013 and 2006 refer to IDs or reference to past years.
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
very EU coded. patents are a joke.
Software is mathematics. The idea you can patent software is as ridiculous as patenting a particular number or the technique of Riemann integration or whatever. I have my name on a couple of software patents[1] and everything about the process is bullshit. When I read my first patent I couldn’t quite believe that this is an accepted legal process. The actual arguably novel part is one page surrounded by hundreds of pages of fiction pretending my thing was a machine to try to game the patent system. It is like the sovereign citizen BS but made real.
[1] … taken out by my employer etc.
OpenAI should have patented pre-training
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
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.
no shot my gpt-3 discord chatbot that did this beats it as prior art
Plenty of previous art.
w/e, plenty of prior art for this
that is just ipc
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.
Not to mention, didn't it recently change to first-to-file as well?
What? How? With no mentions of priors. This idea has been around for a long time - at least since 2024 (Xingyao Wang et al.)
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.
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.
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.
If you are a software developer and you sell your time and IP for money to employers. I highly recommend not looking at patents if you don't want to reduce your market price by introducing the liability of patent infringement. Especially don't publicly comment about the patent, there's almost no upside.
The idea of patents is not to read a feed of the new ones and to discuss them as innovations, it's for the patent holders to use as proof in the future that they had already thought about a thing. The best strategy, in any case, is to publish your own patents, or to document your inventions privately or through your own public channels. Such that in the future IF you are sued for patent infringement, you can prove you didn't arrive at your IP by stealing theirs.
Obligatory: I Am Not A Lawyer
How is this patentable I have a piece of software doing exactly this for me in my dev setup :s
Oh and I have a publicly accessible system doing this since last November… what they gonna do?
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
Never liked the French..
I'd like to patent the term "disadvertisement" and use this as a prime example.
So the European poster child AI company is now doing something that smells of patent trolling? Gee, Europe really isn't helping its image of a society obsessed with lawfare.