China Leads the GenAI Patent Race, Overtaking the US — UN Report

Recent United Nations (UN) data reveals China as the leader in the race of generative AI interventions compared to other countries. Evidently, the country has filed six times more patents than its closest rival, the United States.

According to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), generative AI is exploding, with 50,000 patent applications filed in the past decade, with a quarter of them filed in 2023.

"This is a booming area; this is an area that is growing at an increasing speed. And it's somewhere that we expect to grow even more," Christopher Harrison, WIPO Patent Analytics Manager, told reporters.

In addition, WIPO shared that more than 38,000 GenAI inventions were filed by China between 2014 and 2023, versus 6,276 filed by the United States over the same period.

The top patentors include China’s ByteDance, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, and Microsoft. Based on the WIPO data, South Korea, Japan, and India were ranked third, fourth, and fifth, respectively, with India growing at the fastest rate.

Harrison highlighted that, as per the patent data, the scientific sector is likely to have a profound impact across industries going forward.

WIPO anticipates a further wave of patents to be filed soon and plans to release a future update of the data, possibly using GenAI to illustrate the trend.