Unfortunately there are many patents that simply combine an old thing with a new thing in the obvious way. Since the new thing is new, the combination is "novel".
You pay the lawyer in thousands to use a language which meets the criteria for the patent. Thousands of software patents are repetition of each other with some thing in particular worded differently
/r/ChatGPT (or HN) since about 4-6 months after ChatGPT was released?
Tool calls were immediately obvious, and everyone and their dog was doing their own hacky version of it (today we call it "harness engineering") for a good year before OpenAI wrapped it up in an API.
Seems that this is a patent application from March, so a challenge should still be possible. But it would have to come from a named entity afaik (not a lawyer).
Improvements in existing tech can be patented. An RPC call that an AI writes for itself and then executes is a novelty from prior art. Whether it’s non-obvious is up for debate but if it gets past the patent officer that debate happens via lawsuit
There is _some_ prior art here, though it’s not direct. This is very similar in concept to the joke Python extensions that replaced the global exception handler with one that invokes an LLM.
There are “workflows” that are very similar. Ie I can invoke a Python function that doesn’t exist and the exception gets handed off to an LLM to make it work by making that function exist.
This is functionally similar from what I can gather. Invoke a tool that doesn’t exist, we’ll make it exist for you.
It’ll probably get a patent issued, though, the patent office seems asleep at the wheel in the tech space at least.
September 26, 2025: https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/
Unfortunately there are many patents that simply combine an old thing with a new thing in the obvious way. Since the new thing is new, the combination is "novel".
Law says must be NON obvious
The patent office applies a much lower "non-obviousness" threshold than how a technical person would interpret that word.
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I didn't carefully read either of these, but it reminds me of https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode-mcp/ (note it predates the filing).
You pay the lawyer in thousands to use a language which meets the criteria for the patent. Thousands of software patents are repetition of each other with some thing in particular worded differently
Isn't that patent similar to CodeAct [1], originally described in this paper [2]?
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/agent-framework/agents/cod...
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01030
/r/ChatGPT (or HN) since about 4-6 months after ChatGPT was released?
Tool calls were immediately obvious, and everyone and their dog was doing their own hacky version of it (today we call it "harness engineering") for a good year before OpenAI wrapped it up in an API.
Seems that this is a patent application from March, so a challenge should still be possible. But it would have to come from a named entity afaik (not a lawyer).
In applications before the USPTO anyone can submit preissuance observations, afair, https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s1134.html
The submitter needs to be identified, so get a friend/representative to submit if you want to maintain anonymity.
Improvements in existing tech can be patented. An RPC call that an AI writes for itself and then executes is a novelty from prior art. Whether it’s non-obvious is up for debate but if it gets past the patent officer that debate happens via lawsuit
There is _some_ prior art here, though it’s not direct. This is very similar in concept to the joke Python extensions that replaced the global exception handler with one that invokes an LLM.
There are “workflows” that are very similar. Ie I can invoke a Python function that doesn’t exist and the exception gets handed off to an LLM to make it work by making that function exist.
This is functionally similar from what I can gather. Invoke a tool that doesn’t exist, we’ll make it exist for you.
It’ll probably get a patent issued, though, the patent office seems asleep at the wheel in the tech space at least.
> but if it gets past the patent officer that debate happens via lawsuit
Or an Inter Partes Review!