Independent Inventors
The pillar in full, on the US grant base: who takes the patents, who gives up along the way, and who is missing from the AI gold rush.
Ten organizations vs every garage inventor in America.
2025 US utility patents. The dark bar is every inventor held patent in the country, combined, ranked against the ten largest corporate recipients.
The nation's garage inventors, all of them together, out-patent Samsung Display and nobody else. The top 10 combined took 36,054, more than 2 to 1 over every independent inventor in America.
Inventor held (no company named as owner at the moment of grant) is the standard USPTO proxy for independent inventors. The exact ratio is 2.16 to 1.
Source: USPTO PatentsView, utility patent grants through December 31, 2025.
Who the system works for
The US patent system works. If you can afford to survive it.
The barrier is the cost of surviving the process, not the quality of the invention. Large organizations absorb that cost as overhead. An independent inventor has no overhead to absorb it into.
The process is the barrier
Same office, different odds.
Two views of the same machine, from the same file and the same filing cohorts. One counts who gets a patent. The other counts who gives up.
Grant rate by filing cohort · share eventually granted
The gap never closes
Cohorts stop at 2017 so outcomes are mature; the gap never dips below 14 points. Counting rules and pooled figures are in the methodology.
Source: USPTO Patent Examination Research Dataset (PatEx), 2022 vintage, filing cohorts 2005 to 2017.
Same cohorts 2005 to 2017 · share abandoned before a decision
The barrier is surviving to a decision
Speed is not the barrier
Small entities that persist are granted faster than large ones: median 762 vs 809 days, 2015 filing cohort. What stops them is surviving to a decision at all.
18.9 min In 2022, a small inventor gave up without answering the examiner every 18.9 minutes: 27,751 in the year.
The record shows that the applicant stopped. It does not show why. Same file and cohort window as the grant-rate chart.
Source: USPTO Patent Examination Research Dataset (PatEx), 2022 vintage, filing cohorts 2005 to 2017.
The gold rush
The AI gold rush vs. the garage inventor
AI is the fastest patent wave in modern history: 1% to 5% of all US utility grants in 4 years, faster than the internet or semiconductors managed. It hit a system independent inventors were already locked out of: every year since 2018, companies have taken at least 157 AI patents for every 1 granted to an individual.
In the AI gold rush, individual inventors have almost vanished: 305 company patents for every 1 in 2025
AI patent grants by recipient type, 2018 to 2025. Below the grants, the filings: the AI-titled share of new applications, by quarter.
Share of published applications with AI terms in the title · by filing quarter
AI here means core machine learning patents. "Individual" means the patent itself is assigned to a person, so inventors employed by companies count under their employer. The ChatGPT marker sits on the filings strip only: a patent granted in 2023 was typically filed years earlier. Scope and exclusions are in the methodology.
Sources: USPTO PatentsView, AI (CPC G06N) utility grants through December 31, 2025; USPTO pre-grant published applications, AI terms in title, filing quarters through 2025-Q2.
Organizations multiplied their patents 5.5x in fifty years. Independent inventors stayed flat.
For every inventor-held US patent in 1976, organizations received 4. In 2025, 18.5. The dark band is the inventor's share of the whole system.
Same inventor-held proxy as above. The red field is every organization: companies, universities and governments alike.
Source: USPTO PatentsView, utility patent grants through December 31, 2025.
About this data
Every figure on this page is counted from the records the USPTO publishes. On July 31, 2026 the core findings were independently recomputed from the raw files: 111 automated checks, every number matched. Each dataset, with its source and coverage, is listed in the methodology, along with what this page does not claim.
USPTO PatEx: uspto.gov research datasets (product ECOPAIR) · USPTO PatentsView: patentsview.org/download · Analysis: Red Tape Index, 2026