Executive summary

This WIPO Technology SPARK (Short Pieces of Analysis, Research and Knowledge) Report provides an update to the WIPO Patent Landscape Report: Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). ⁽¹⁾World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) (2024). Generative Artificial Intelligence. Patent Landscape Report. Geneva: WIPO. https://www.wipo.int/web-publications/patent-landscape-report-generative-artificial-intelligence-genai/en/index.html The 2024 Patent Landscape Report covered a period of 10 years from 2014 to 2023. This Technology SPARK Report now extends the patent analysis through to 2025. It highlights the most significant developments in GenAI patenting over the past two years – a period in which the field has moved from early-stage experimentation to large-scale commercial deployment across a widening range of industries and applications.

The original report from 2024 anticipated that the post-ChatGPT surge in research and development would translate into accelerating patent activity as the typical 18-month filing-to-publication lag closed. The updated figures for 2025 confirm this, with GenAI patenting activity accelerating at an unprecedented pace. The number of published patent families (a measure for new inventions) in GenAI rose from approximately 14,000 in 2023 to over 37,000 in 2025. In total, more than 56,000 new GenAI patent families were published in 2024 and 2025 alone – exceeding the entire cumulative output of the preceding decade (2014 to 2023). GenAI now accounts for 8.7% of all artificial intelligence (AI) published patent families, up from 6.1% in 2023.

The ranking of top patent owners has shifted significantly. SoftBank has emerged as the largest single GenAI patent holder by volume, with nearly 3,000 patent families published – almost entirely in 2025 – driven by its broad AI infrastructure and investment strategy. The Chinese leaders – Tencent, Ping An and Baidu – remain among the largest cumulative patent owners. Alphabet (Google) has become the largest US-based GenAI patent owner. Notable new entrants in the top 25 GenAI patent owners include State Grid Corporation of China, Nvidia, Inspur Group and Bosch.

China continues to dominate in GenAI patenting volume, but the growth is becoming more global. China-based inventors published over 43,000 GenAI patent families in 2024 and 2025, more than the country’s entire output from 2014 to 2023. However, several other countries posted even higher relative growth rates, including the United States (92% compound annual growth rate), Japan (210%), Germany (85%), Canada (109%) and Switzerland (124%).

Large language models (LLMs) have overtaken generative adversarial networks (GANs) as the dominant GenAI model type. In 2025, LLM patent families outnumbered GANs by nearly three to one (14,100 patent family publications versus 5,200). Diffusion models have also grown rapidly and now rank third. This shift reflects the transition from a GenAI field that is centered on adversarial image generation ⁽²⁾Adversarial image generation – the approach underlying generative adversarial networks (GANs) – relies on two neural networks trained in competition with one another: a generator that produces synthetic images and a discriminator that attempts to distinguish generated images from real ones. Through this adversarial training process, both networks improve over time, enabling the generator to produce increasingly realistic images to one driven by large-scale language and multimodal models. As a result, text is also increasingly catching up with image/video as the leading data mode. Software/code and 3D modeling are among the fastest-growing smaller data type categories, reflecting the broadening range of GenAI applications.

As GenAI technologies continue to mature and spread into new industries and application domains, the patent landscape is likely to keep expanding and the strategic importance of understanding it will only grow. For policymakers, businesses and intellectual property (IP) professionals, the message from this 2026 WIPO update is clear: the GenAI patent landscape is evolving faster than ever, and the strategic decisions being made now – about where to file, what to protect and how to navigate an increasingly crowded field – will shape competitive positions for years to come.