Who holds the most AI-related patent applications? If you guessed Microsoft, Google, or OpenAI, you’d be wrong. IBM currently tops the list of companies holding the most AI-related patent applications in the US over the past five years, reports Axios. While patents may be filed solely to have first dibs on copyrights, the volume of the applications indicate serious interest from Big Tech.

IBM made 1.6k patent applications within the last five years, according to analysis by patent database IFI Claims. The patent data analytics firm cites Google as the second in lead, followed by Microsoft, Samsung, Intel and Adobe, Capital One, and Baidu. A large percentage of the copyrights were specific to generative AI.

OpenAI didn’t even crack the top 25 — although that figure may not show the whole picture. IFI Claims reported just one patent application filed by the AI research company, which “is surprising for an organization that is knowledge based,” IFI says. Still, it’s important to note that this is the only publicly available patent application, which means there may have been more recent filings that haven’t made it to the public eye yet. Another explanation is that OpenAI is prioritizing protecting its existing IP.

What are they patenting? IBM’s genAI patents vary across image, speech, text, and video, as do Google and Samsung’s applications. Nvidia’s patents mostly focus on image and video AI, while Apple is focusing their copyrights on speech genAI.

As tech giants are doubling down on AI, they’ve also been slashing jobs. So far, some 34k people in the US tech industry have lost their jobs since the start of 2024. While these USD bn companies claim that not all workers were replaced by AI, news of job cuts came hot on the heels of major investments in AI by those same companies.

Hackers had a lucrative year: Ransomware attacks saw hackers reel in around USD 1.1 bn in crypto last year, essentially doubling y-o-y from USD 567 mn in 2022, Axios reports. In addition to the steep y-o-y increase, last year’s haul from ransomware hackers is the highest value of payments Chainalysis has seen in the past five years, which Chainalysis suggests could be due to “the growing number of gangs getting involved in ransomware,” while Axios notes that the increase points to their deft maneuvering of law enforcement.

Some businesses opt to give in to hackers: When a business is targeted by a cybersecurity attack, sometimes it costs less to pay the requested ransom than to wait out the losses in revenue from their blocked systems, Axios notes. That being said, fewer businesses paid out ransoms, with some 29% of targeted businesses making payments in 4Q 2023 compared to 85% in 1Q 2019, according to Coveware. As the total amount of ransomware payments has gone up, the number of payers has dropped, “suggesting hackers are asking for more money in each attack.” The average ransom payment dropped 33% q-o-q in 4Q 2023 to USD 569k, Coveware’s data shows.

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