AI TRENDS | Anthropic and OpenAI Accused of Infringing Neural Network Patents

Flinn Artificial Intelligence Technology LLC (Flinn AI) filed two complaints in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, accusing Anthropic PBC and OpenAI OpCo of infringing five patents held by co-inventors Steven Flinn and Naomi Moneypenny. According to Sina Finance, the complaints say the patent applications, filed in late 2015 and early 2016, sought to protect attention-based neural network technology that now underpins key functions of modern generative AI systems. The complaint against Anthropic focuses mainly on its Claude language models and alleges ongoing infringement as the company releases more advanced versions; it says Claude models and related products offer attention-based reasoning, retrieval, memory, agentic, and multimodal features that infringe the patents. The complaint against OpenAI makes similar allegations, saying the alleged infringement has expanded as its models have become more advanced. Flinn also founded ManyWorlds Inc., which Moneypenny later joined. Earlier this year, a similarly named company, Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC, sued OpenAI and Spotify over separate content-recommendation patents held by Flinn and Moneypenny.