Patent Access
United States
Official USPTO data on a patent system that works for 300 organizations: who takes the grants, who gives up along the way, and who is missing from the AI gold rush.
Top Performers
- 1
Samsung Display Co., Ltd.
10,744 utility patents in 2025
- 2
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Ltd.
4,195 utility patents in 2025
- 3
QUALCOMM Incorporated
3,767 utility patents in 2025
Improvement Opportunity
- 1
Independent inventors, combined
16,715 patents, 5.1% of all 2025 grants
- 2
Micro entity applicants
35% of applications die at an unanswered office action
- 3
Individuals in AI
42 AI patents in 2025 against 12,809 for companies
Ten organizations vs every garage inventor in America.
2025 US utility patents. The dark bar is every inventor held patent in the country, combined, ranked against the ten largest corporate recipients.
The nation's garage inventors, all of them together, out patent Samsung Display alone and nobody else. The top 10 combined took 36,054, more than 2 to 1 over every independent inventor in America.
Inventor held means unassigned at grant plus patents assigned only to natural persons, the standard USPTO proxy for independent inventors. Top 10 uses PatentsView disambiguated assignees, which can split corporate families; family level totals are higher, not lower. The exact top 10 to inventor ratio is 2.16 to 1.
Source: USPTO PatentsView bulk data, utility patent grants through December 31, 2025, disambiguated assignees.
Who the system works for
The US patent system works beautifully. For 300 organizations.
Every chart below is computed from official USPTO records, the full base, never a sample. Together they say one thing: the barrier is not the quality of the invention, it is the cost of surviving the process. Large organizations absorb that cost as overhead. Independent inventors absorb it as defeat.
300 organizations took 42.6% of every US patent granted in 2025
The entry ticket to the top 300 was 131 patents in a single year, a volume game no independent inventor can play. Hover the red segment for the full top 10.
325,822
Utility patents granted in 2025
42.6%
Taken by the top 300 organizations
131
Patents needed in one year to enter the club
Counts use PatentsView disambiguated assignees, which can split corporate families into separate entities (Samsung Display is counted separately from Samsung Electronics), so family level concentration is higher than shown, not lower. Denominator is all 325,822 utility patents granted in 2025, including patents with no organizational assignee.
Source: USPTO PatentsView bulk data, utility patent grants through December 31, 2025, disambiguated assignees.
The process is the barrier
Same office, different odds.
Two views of the same machine. Across thirteen filing cohorts the grant rate gap between large and small entities never dips below 14 points. And when small applicants lose, they overwhelmingly lose the same way: a legal letter nobody answered.
Grant rate by filing cohort · share eventually granted
The gap never closes
13 cohorts, 2005 to 2017. Widest: 20.6 points (2015). Latest: 18.3 points. It never dips below 14.
Application level grant rates from the USPTO PatEx research dataset, 2022 vintage, 14.1M applications. Cohorts stop at 2017 so outcomes are mature; still pending applications count as not granted for both groups. Micro entity rates are excluded: the category only became meaningful after the 2013 America Invents Act. Pooled across 2005 to 2017: large 58.4%, small 41.7%.
Source: USPTO Patent Examination Research Dataset (PatEx), 2022 vintage, filing cohorts 2005 to 2017.
Pooled filings 2013 to 2018 · share ending at an unanswered office action
Death by unanswered letter
Of everything micro inventors abandon, 95% ends here: a letter nobody answered.
19 min In 2022, a small inventor application died at an unanswered office action every 19 minutes: 27,751 in the year.
Nonprovisional applications filed 2013 to 2018 with entity status recorded; still pending applications count as not abandoned, so all three red figures are floors. Entity status is USPTO fee status as last recorded, not revenue; the micro category exists only from March 2013. The status text records that the applicant did not respond, not why: cost, discouragement, or a rational exit. The 2022 rate counts 27,751 small and micro entity applications abandoned for failure to respond to an office action during calendar year 2022, one per 18.9 minutes on average.
Source: USPTO Patent Examination Research Dataset (PatEx), 2022 vintage.
The gold rush
The AI gold rush vs. the garage inventor
AI is the fastest patent wave in modern history: it went from 1% to 5% of all US utility grants in 4 years, a climb the internet took 13 years to make and semiconductors took 18. It hit a system independent inventors were already locked out of, and in every single year since 2018 companies have taken at least 157 AI patents for every 1 granted to an individual.
In the AI gold rush, individual inventors have almost vanished: 305 company patents for every 1
Companies multiplied their AI patents from 1,885 in 2018 to a 15,840 peak in 2023. Individuals never cleared 44 in any year, and in 2025 the score was 12,809 to 42.
AI is defined as CPC class G06N (core machine learning). Actor type comes from PatentsView assignee disambiguation; 'individual' means the patent is assigned to a person, so inventors employed by companies are counted under their employer. Roughly 284 of the 13,786 AI grants in 2025 had no assignee record (typically inventor retained) and are excluded from the split, so the individual figure understates inventor held AI patents slightly, not enough to change the picture. Government labs (36 grants in 2025) are omitted from the lines because they overlap the individuals line at this scale; hover any year for their values.
Source: USPTO PatentsView bulk data, AI (CPC G06N) utility grants through December 31, 2025, disambiguated assignees.
Organizations multiplied their patents 5.5x in fifty years. Independent inventors stayed flat.
For every US patent granted to an independent inventor in 1976, organizations received 4. In 2025 they received 18.5: 309,107 against 16,715. The dark band is the inventor's share of the whole system.
Inventor held means unassigned at grant plus patents assigned only to natural persons, the standard USPTO proxy for independent inventors; some unassigned patents are assigned to companies later, so the level is a proxy while the fifty year trend is robust. Utility patents only. The red field includes universities and governments, not only companies.
Source: USPTO PatentsView bulk data, utility patent grants through December 31, 2025, disambiguated assignees.
About this data
Every figure on this page is computed directly from two official USPTO bulk data programs: the Patent Examination Research Dataset (PatEx, 2022 vintage, 14.1 million applications) and PatentsView (granted patents and disambiguated assignees through December 31, 2025). No numbers are modeled, sampled, or extrapolated, and every displayed value is re-verified against the raw files before publication. Where a finding cuts against the story, it stays on the page: small entities that persist are actually granted slightly faster than large ones (median 762 vs 809 days for the 2015 cohort). The filter is surviving years of legal cost, not examiner speed. The 2022 abandonment rate on this page comes from the same PatEx transaction records, counted, not modeled.
USPTO PatEx: uspto.gov research datasets · USPTO PatentsView: patentsview.org/download · Analysis: Red Tape Index, 2026