China tops UN list with six-times more GenAI patents than USA, India fifth but growing at fastest rate

China has been filing six times more generative AI patents than USA

China dwarfs all other nations in patents and inventions relating to generative AI such as chatbots, but India has quickly emerged in the top five based on related inventions, and is growing at the fastest rate in the world, a UN-backed report said on July 3.

The Patent Landscape Report on Generative AI, issued by World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) said that China has been filing the most number of generative AI patents, six times more than second-place USA. India is the fifth-biggest destination for GenAI inventions, clocking the highest average annual growth rate among the top five leaders at 56 percent.

Chinese companies also dominated the list of enterprises that have applied for GenAI patents, with top ten companies as follows: Tencent (2,074 inventions), Ping An Insurance (1,564 inventions), Baidu (1,234 inventions), Chinese Academy of Sciences (607), IBM (601), Alibaba Group (571), Samsung Electronics (468), Alphabet (443), ByteDance (418), Microsoft (377).

The top five locations for GenAI inventions are: China (38,210 inventions), US (6,276 inventions), Republic of Korea (4,155 inventions), Japan (3,409) and India (1,350).

The report revealed that the number of GenAI patents has increased by  eight-fold since 2017, capturing a frenzied rush to own a large number of IPs in this space.

Generative AI produces text, images, computer code and even music from existing information on the internet, and the space is in overdrive with more than 50,000 patent applications filed in the last decade. Out of these, nearly 25 percent were filed last year alone.