Anthropic and OpenAI sued over neural network patents

Anthropic and OpenAI face a lawsuit alleging that they infringe inventors’ neural network patents, Reuters reported on November 12. For Anthropic it is already the second patent fight in four months: in July, the University of Tennessee Research Foundation sued it in Delaware federal court over two patents on neuroscience-inspired machine learning.

The foundation is a non-profit that licenses the University of Tennessee’s intellectual property. It filed its complaint on July 20, and the complaint became public a day later. The complaint says Anthropic’s AI systems infringe two patents invented by the university’s professors, which it describes as “significant contributions to the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, neuromorphic computing and neuroscience-inspired computing.” The foundation asks for an unspecified amount of damages and a court order that would block Anthropic from infringing the patents. The Tennessee case was thought to be the first patent suit against Anthropic.

On the day the foundation filed, a California federal judge approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement of a class action brought by authors over the use of their work to train AI. The complaint links the two cases directly: “Anthropic’s cavalier approach to others’ intellectual property rights in the development of its products extends beyond the use of copyrighted material.”

The foundation’s case leans on how early the inventions came. According to the complaint, they were developed and put into practice “years before artificial intelligence systems became widely deployed in commercial products and services.” Apple, Google and Microsoft have also cited UT’s patents when filing for their own patents on related technologies, Knox News reports.

Anthropic responded to the Tennessee suit with a statement from a spokesperson: “We disagree with the allegations and intend to defend this case vigorously.”