Ask HN: How are early-stage AI startups thinking about IP protection? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How are early-stage AI startups thinking about IP protection?

Hi HN,

I’m researching how early-stage AI and health-tech startups think about protecting their innovations.

Traditional patents are expensive, slow and often misaligned with how fast AI products evolve. I’m curious:

Are founders filing patents early? Are you relying on trade secrets? Publishing defensively? Not worrying about IP at all? Waiting until revenue?

We’re collecting responses through a short 60-second survey to better understand real-world behavior:

https://forms.gle/8UAytkGNfge4GKrH8

If you’d rather just comment here, that’s equally helpful.

I’m happy to share aggregated insights back with the community.

Thanks, Shaheen

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It highly depends on the industry but in health-tech, startups still opt for patent protection, simply because it works. For anything that is not suitable for patents, many founders opt for trade secret (as patents are open to everyone and can be used by competition to figure out how you're doing what you're doing).

Another strategy that I have seen experienced founder following is keeping their patent under examination for longer. They either respond late to the examiner's questions, purposefully opt for GAUs (Group art units. Different GAU reviews different tech patents) where the prosecution timeline is slower. This gives them extra time to keep their innovations hidden while still protected, until they are ready to enter market with viable products.

For AI based, software patents are a tricky game with many getting rejected under Alice 101 rejections. The drafting and prosecution methods also change a lot when dealing with software patents about AI.

I can share more in-detail if you have any specific question.

Context: I am not a founder but I work in a Patent and technology consultation company and we regularly help with prior art searching, patent monetization, and large scale patent analysis on industry.

I have talked to about 200 early stage founders last year through conferences or in-person interviews and talked specifically about this topic.

Thanks for this. Super helpful perspective.

The point about health-tech still leaning on patents because “it works” is interesting. From your conversations with early-stage founders, did you notice whether that confidence comes from actual enforcement experience, or more from investor expectation and signaling value?

The GAU strategy you mentioned is also fascinating. Intentionally slowing prosecution to stay under examination longer. In practice, do founders see that as a strategic delay tactic, or is it mostly attorney-driven?

And on AI/software patents given how common 101 rejections are post-Alice, do you feel early-stage teams still see patents as worth the cost and uncertainty? Or are they filing more for positioning than enforceability?

Really appreciate you sharing your experience would love to understand where you think the biggest blind spots are for early-stage teams.

Glad to be of help here. Let me answer the questions one by one.

- You're right about the confidence coming from investor expectations than actual enforcement experience. Startups avoid falling into patent litigation cycles as at early stages their primary goal is survival and gather funding. Health-tech requires heavy funding similar to industries like energy, or pharma. Having a patent secured innovation gives a positive signals to both potential partners and investors - that this startup has invented something new, and that their innovation is protected from being infringed. Whether a startup will actually enforce the patent in future highly depends on specific situation of their market. I have seen many startups (specifically the ones working on drug development platforms) more open to license their technology. Patents make that a little easy as it is a well known industry practice.

- It's mostly attorney driven as most founders who are working on their first or second ventures are not familiar with patent laws that well (unless they come from that background). This strategy is also only applicable in specific scenarios where it makes sense to keep the innovation hidden from competition (where you have lots of competing companies or where your work is catching lots of media attention).

- I haven't specifically seen this being discussed or got a chance to talk about it with a founder but I can share my experience here. AI/software patents are still surviving and only obvious patents are facing difficulties. You might have heard about Zoom vs Apollo dispute recently where court dismissed Apollo's motion against Zoom patents being invalid under Alice (My team is working on a story on that case separately). The patent has explained the inventiveness of the innovation being covered in a way that it is not abstract and actually showcase the improvement over prior art. If an innovation's inventiveness and improvement can be described in a non-obvious way (avoiding 'intelligent parser' and writing '0-5 point scoring system based on 5 parameters'), the patents can work.

Final thought about the last point: A patent's worth and cost is directly proportional to how important that innovation is for the industry (not for the startup patenting it). If a solution has multi-industry applications, it is not an incremental innovation but actually goes beyond SOTA, then a startup should opt for multi step protection, not just patent. Copyright the code, maintain trade secrets wherever possible, and patent the processes (if they solve the technical problems).

Feel free to share more questions or contact me on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/b2b-marketer/

You can file a provisional patent, which gives you the ability to discuss your innovation in public without compromising your full patent filing. It gives you a year to file a full patent for the invention, and it's much cheaper than a full patent, but does not necessarily protect your IP. That's what I did in the hopes I can get enough traction and capital to file a full one. Otherwise I would just consider the IP a trade secret and not disclose.

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