The new GenAI Report for WIPO
Generative AI has entered a new phase – patents have doubled in just one year.
The latest WIPO/EconSight report shows that more than 38,000 new GenAI patent families were published in 2025 alone, more than double that of 2024. Companies are moving from experimentation to large-scale deployment.
This is an update to the GenAI Patent Landscape Report from 2024 which EconSight carried out for WIPO.
Key findings include:
- LLMs have become the dominant architecture, overtaking earlier approaches like GANs, while diffusion and multimodal systems widen the field — and reasoning models and AI agents are starting to appear in filings.
- The cast of players is broadening. Telecom firms, infrastructure providers, industrial companies and utilities are now filing alongside the traditional software and internet giants.
- Innovation is going global. China still leads by a wide margin, but rapid growth in the US, Japan and parts of Europe is making the landscape more dynamic — Japan’s rise shows how a single major player can reshape national numbers fast.
- One sign of how early we still are: international patent families remain a small share of filings, suggesting many inventions are still concentrated in home markets. As business models stabilize, expect more of these patents to go global.
- Looking ahead, multimodal systems, reasoning-oriented models, AI agents, and efficiency gains in training and inference are likely to define the next wave — and GenAI’s push into healthcare, manufacturing, finance and energy will keep widening the field of who’s filing.
The message for policymakers, businesses and IP professionals is clear: the GenAI patent landscape is getting larger, more global and more strategically significant. Watching it closely is no longer optional.
