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Using AI for USPTO Prior Art Searches, and IP in the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’
June 11th, 2025
Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Adam Schiff (D-CA), respectively the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, have written to Coke Morgan Stewart, Acting Director of the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) encouraging the USPTO to explore how to use artificial intelligence (AI) to improve prior art searches by patent examiners.
According to the letter,
Fundamental to the patent and trademark examination process is search. In the patent context, thorough and complete prior art searches, at every stage of examination – be it for a Non-Final Office Action, Final Office Action, or Notice of Allowance – are key to ensuring high-quality and efficient examination. These searches must not just capture the claimed invention, but also the inventive concept as disclosed by the specification. Unfortunately, the quality and adaptability of the search tools currently available to examiners has not kept pace with search technology currently available to the public. Current AI tools have already proven to be extremely powerful at analyzing text and images, the core components of patent applications.
The letter notes that “[t]he USPTO maintains both unpublished and published data, which is ripe for use for training AI models, which could be used by examiners.”
AI has been used for prior art searches in other countries. For example, since at least 2021, the Israel Patent Authority has been using an AI and deep learning-based search engine developed by Similari Ltd for prior art search, in addition to using standard search engines.
At least as far back as 2023, the USPTO has been considering using AI to improve prior art searches.
As Fedscoop reported, the USPTO issued a Request for Information in 2023 seeking information on solutions that would leverage technologies like AI and machine learning to “expand, rank and sort the results of existing patent search systems so that prior art that might have otherwise not been present in or near the top of a list of search results is made readily available to examiners.”
The new letter requests that the Acting Director report back on specific steps to investigate the matter by July 3, 2025.
In other Congressional IP-related news, H.R. 1, known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA), which passed the House on May 22, 2025, contains several IP law provisions.
Among other things, the OBBBA would:
- Eliminate the 2020 American Innovation and Manufacturing Act, which dealt with climate change and stimulating patentable inventions of new substances and technologies.
- Provide $500 million in new funding on IT modernization with an AI-related solution, possibly affecting the USPTO and funding the effort called for in the letter discussed above.
- Ban states, counties, cities, and other non-federal governments from regulating AI for 10 years (with some exceptions).
- Merge the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) into the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), potentially harming the quality and confidence in intellectual property audits and valuation processes for public companies.
- Make domestic research and experimental expenditures deductible and suspend existing rules for amortization.
- Extend tax benefits for film and TV production and live theatrical production to include sound recording productions.
- When a nonprofit such as a university sells or licenses any name or logo associated with it, including the copyrights or trademarks associated with such words and images, it requires that the revenue from such transactions be treated as unrelated business income and taxed at ordinary rates.
- Impose a new excise tax on income generated by colleges and universities on royalty income generated by research and development, patents, copyrights, or other intellectual or intangible property that the federal government subsidized.
These last two items may be related to the Trump administration’s “targeting” of universities, as reported in the New York Times.
As the Times recently stated,
President Trump and his allies have focused their attacks on elite universities, which they say are bastions of antisemitism and ideological indoctrination. But the moves could remake higher education across the country. Billions of dollars in research funds have been frozen, while administration officials have also threatened to prevent universities from enrolling international students.
As the National Science Foundation reported,
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Institutions of higher education in the United States spent nearly $90 billion on R&D in FY 2021, the highest amount reported to date. Most of that spending (55%) was financed by federal government sources.
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Higher education institutions perform a significant amount of the basic research conducted in the United States. In calendar year 2021, academic institutions represented 44% of U.S. basic research performed that year. However, that share has declined since 2012, when academia performed 54% of basic research. Overall, academic research and development (R&D) represented 11% of total U.S. R&D performed in 2021, compared with 14% in 2012.
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In 2021, the United States ranked highest among 32 leading countries or regions in total funding of academic R&D. Still, it ranked 23rd when academic R&D spending is expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product.
As this paper explains,
the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 is often considered as a landmark in university patenting (OECD, 2000; Henderson et al., 1998). This law granted permission for federally funded researchers to file for patents and to issue licenses for these patents to other parties.
However, according to this paper, “since the 2000s university patenting in the most advanced economies has been on the decline both as a percentage and in absolute terms.”
According to CBS News,
The so-called "one big, beautiful bill" narrowly passed the House last month and now faces significant challenges in the Senate, including from holdouts like GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who opposes the bill in its current form. Elon Musk, the former head of the Department of Government Efficiency, has also publicly slammed the bill's price tag and tried to convince lawmakers to kill it.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, as reported in the Times, the OBBBA “would add $2.4 trillion to the already soaring national debt over the next decade.”