[BubbleRings]

Yeah no kidding. For instance, if you are an independent inventor trying to write a patent while keeping your patent lawyer expenses to a minimum, you want to write as much of the first draft(s) of the patent as you can yourself. (You’ll save billable hours with your patent lawyer, and you’ll end up with a better patent because you’ll communicate your innovations more clearly to your lawyer.)

However, and this is the big thing, you absolutely do not want to be asking a SOTA LLM for help with the language in your patent application. This is because describing your invention to a web based LLM could be considered a public “disclosure” of your invention, which, (after a one year grace period goes by), could put your invention in the public domain, basically—and thereby prevent you (or anyone else) from being able to ever patent the invention. Plus, you know, a random unscrupulous employer at the SOTA company could be reviewing logs and notice your great idea, and file a patent on it before you do, and remember, the United States patent office went to “first to file” in 2013.

Oh and don’t take legal advice from random people in the internet by the way.

[solenoid0937]

> This is because describing your invention to a web based LLM could be considered a public “disclosure” of your invention, which, (after a one year grace period goes by), could put your invention in the public domain, basically—and thereby prevent you (or anyone else) from being able to ever patent the invention.

This is simply not true. Even if it were true (and again, it's not) you could simply use zero data retention APIs.

No one at the big model companies is trawling through your chats to steal your patents. It's not only illegal and against their own terms of service, but these people have better uses of their time.

[BubbleRings]

If a competitor to your business discovers that you used a free online AI to help draft your patent 1.5 years ago, that competitor could then cause your patent to be invalidated, which could be greatly to their benefit of course.

The Terms of Service (ToS) for Open/Public AI (e.g., free consumer versions of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) often reserve the right to store your prompts and use them to train and refine the model.

Doing an enabling disclosure of your patent draft to another party that is not bound by a non-disclosure agreement is a big mistake, at least while the case law has not yet been settled.

My post was meant to be encouraging to people that might be considering local LLM for this specific use case, where protecting confidential information is of particular importance.

[solenoid0937]

1. This absolutely wouldn't count as disclosure under the eye of the law.

2. ZDR + frontier LLMs would still be far more effective than local LLMs.

3. By your logic you can't upload patent drafts to Google Docs because Google hasn't signed an NDA, but this obviously is not the case.

The law is a lot less strict to the letter than you think it is. Intent and spirit of the law matter. Any judge would throw such a case out.