AI Patents in the United States and China: Measurement, Organization, and Knowledge Flows

Researchers, managers and policymakers are exploring different approaches and data sources to map the development and the diffusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this research note, we illustrate the opportunities offered by trademark data. We argue that AI trademarks can complement AI patents to capture different dimensions of AI innovation. AI trademarks can reveal the extent and ways in which companies exploit AI technologies to develop new goods and services. Importantly, trademark data offer a timely and globally available data source that covers all economic sectors. We present insights from using AI trademarks in an empirical exploration of Italian firms. In our discussion, we reflect on how AI trademarks can be used at different levels of analysis to tackle emerging questions about the development and diffusion of AI.

The AI race amplifies security risks and international tensions. While the US restricts mobility and knowledge flows, challenges regulatory efforts to protect its advantage, China leads initiatives of global governance. Both strategies depend on cross-country relationships in AI innovation; yet, how this system evolves is unclear. Here, we measure the processes of polarization and integration in the global AI research over three decades by using large-scale data of scientific publications. Comparing cross-country collaboration and citation links to their random realizations, we find that the US and China have long diverged in both dimensions, forming two poles around which global AI research increasingly revolves. While the United Kingdom and Germany have integrated exclusively with the US, many European countries have converged with both poles. Developing and further developed countries, however, only integrate with China, signaling its expanding influence over the international AI research landscape. Our results inform national science policies and efforts toward global AI regulations.

The European Patent Office (EPO) reported record filings in 2025, and the 2026 EPO Guidelines hold applicants strictly responsible for LLM-assisted content under Article 83 and Rule 42, creating pressure to triage suspected AI-generated patent text. Two constraints make this hard. First, realistic prosecution settings often have only consumer GPUs with about 8 GB VRAM, not datacenter-class scoring stacks. Second, Article 84 of the European Patent Convention requires claims to be clear and concise, pushing human drafting onto the same low-perplexity, low-burstiness manifold that LLMs occupy. We benchmark three open-source zero-shot detectors on 500 granted EPO H04 telecom patents versus 500 LLM-generated counterparts using five prompting strategies, all under the consumer hardware envelope. At claim level, all detectors exceed 60 percent false-positive rate: Binoculars 78.3 percent, Fast-DetectGPT 61.3 percent, DetectGPT 80.5 percent. The failure persists under Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct regeneration, LoRA-adapted Pythia-2.8B scoring heads, cross-IPC replication on A61K, C07D, and F03D (mean FPR 84.6 percent), and H100 re-evaluation with published Falcon-7B and GPT-J-6B heads, arguing the issue is structural rather than substitute-model capacity. A seven-feature linguistic-complexity logistic regression reaches 74.0 percent accuracy at 28.1 percent FPR, a 13 percentage-point gain over a perplexity-only baseline at a comparable operating point, without using likelihood at inference and within the same hardware budget.