Recently, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) published a report on the global patent landscape for generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies. The report indicates that the combined number of newly published patent families in 2024 and 2025 exceeded the total for the preceding 10 years. Although the United States recorded a higher annual growth rate for published patent families in this field, six of the top 10 patent applicants are based in China, highlighting the country's establishing dominance in this highly valuable and critical emerging technology sector.

US Growth Rate Remains High, but China Is the World's Largest Source of GenAI Patents

WIPO's patent landscape report tracks patent application data since 2013, showing that 14,000 GenAI patent families were published globally in that year, whereas new patent families in this domain grew to 37,800 publications in 2025. Regarding overall AI technologies, global patent publication data also reveals that GenAI's share of all AI-related patent families rose from 4.2% in 2017 to 8.7% in 2025.

Chinese multinational enterprises and the Chinese Academy of Sciences occupy four of the top five spots among GenAI patent applicants, with the top spot held by the Japanese comprehensive technology group, SoftBank Group. Since 2013, SoftBank Group has become the source of nearly 3,000 published patent families claiming GenAI technology, leading its Chinese counterparts Tencent Holdings Limited (Tencent Holdings, 2,702 patent families), Ping An Insurance Group (Ping An Insurance Group, 2,240 patent families), and Baidu (Baidu, 1,902 patent families). Interestingly, nearly all patent families attributed to SoftBank Group in this study were published between 2024 and 2025, contributing significantly to the combined total of 56,000 patent families published across those two years—a figure that surpasses the cumulative total of published patent families from the preceding 10 years. US enterprises ranking among the top 10 GenAI patent applicants include Alphabet, Microsoft, and International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).

China occupies an absolutely dominant position as the world's largest source of published GenAI patents, publishing more than 43,000 patent families between 2024 and 2025. Although the US published only 4,380 patent families in 2025, its compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of published patent families from 2023 to 2025 reached 92%, exceeding China's CAGR of 64% during the same period. Driven by SoftBank Group's recent explosive surge in published patent families, Japan experienced a CAGR of 210%, representing the largest increase among all major patent-filing countries in the WIPO study.

Text-Based Large Language Models (LLMs) Dominate the Model Domain, Image/Video Is the Primary GenAI Modality

LLMs have largely replaced Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to become the GenAI model type with the highest number of published patent families. In 2025, LLMs surpassed GANs by a ratio of nearly 3:1 in their respective shares of GenAI patent families. WIPO's study indicates that this gap represents a major shift in the underlying architectures supporting the current GenAI wave—transitioning from image-based GANs used for image enhancement and synthetic data generation to text-based LLMs trained on statistical patterns of language structures.

Among GenAI modalities (which determine the input and output data formats of GenAI models), image/video remains the dominant modality, accounting for approximately 40,000 GenAI patent families published between 2024 and 2025. As WIPO notes, this finding does not contradict LLMs becoming the primary GenAI model type, because the image/video modality is adopted by LLMs, GANs, diffusion models, and other GenAI models. WIPO points out that published text-modality GenAI patents have grown significantly in recent years, increasing from 3,400 patent families in 2023 to nearly 11,800 patent families in 2025—a trend that reflects the growing number of LLM model patent families.

WIPO's patent landscape study confirms that the acceleration in patenting activity first observed in its 2024 GenAI patent landscape report has developed into a surge in patenting activity, underscoring several technological shifts. Although Asian entities dominate the major applicants in this field, recent growth in Japan, the European Union, and the United States suggests that GenAI innovation is becoming more widely distributed globally. Furthermore, international patent families account for only a small share of total GenAI applications, indicating that most AI inventions are concentrated in domestic markets and lack significant global protection strategies. Looking ahead, WIPO anticipates rapid developments in research and patent applications in areas such as multimodal systems and AI agents, while the integration of GenAI into sectors like healthcare, finance, and energy is expected to further diversify the companies filing patents in this field.