On October 27, 2020, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) released the report "Inventing AI Tracing the diffusion of artificial intelligence with U.S. patents".

The report shows that from 2002 to 2018, the annual number of applications for artificial intelligence patents in the United States increased by more than 100%, from 30,000 to more than 60,000 per year, and the share of patent applications containing artificial intelligence rose from 9% to nearly 16 %.

At the same time, the proportion of inventors and patentees active in the field of artificial intelligence rose from 1% in 1976 to 25% in 2018. In addition, most of the top 30 artificial intelligence companies come from the field of information and communication technology, with special cases such as Bank of America, Boeing and General Electric.

The report uses machine-learning artificial intelligence algorithms to identify all U.S. artificial intelligence patent applications issued from 1976 to 2018. This method can flexibly learn from the text of patent documents without being excessively restricted by specific classification numbers and keywords, thereby improving the accuracy of identifying artificial intelligence patents.