IP Law Daily, PATENT NEWS: Anthropic’s artificial intelligence systems accused of infringing neural network patents, (Nov 13, 2026)

By Brian Craig, J.D.

The complaint alleges willful infringement of five patents for attention-based neural-network architectures.

A technology company that owns patents invented by two computer scientists has filed a lawsuit against software company Anthropic in federal district court in Delaware for allegedly infringing five patents related to neural networks in developing Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The complaint filed by Flinn Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technologies accuses Anthropic of using patented technologies to “build and expand one of the fastest-growing artificial-intelligence businesses in history without paying for them.” The complaint, filed less than a week before Anthropic’s scheduled initial public offering (IPO), accuses the software company of willful infringement and requests damages and other relief, including royalties for past infringement and ongoing infringement (Flinn Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technologies, LLC v. Anthropic, PBC, No. 1:26-cv-01454-UNA (D. Del. filed Nov. 12, 2026)).

Infringement claims. The complaint filed by Flinn Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technologies, LLC (“Flinn”) against Anthropic alleges infringement of five patents related to attention-based neural-network architectures. The five patents include U.S. Patent Nos. 12,327,166; 12,223,404; 12,511,50; 12,462,197; and 12,462,198. Steven Flinn and Naomi Felina Moneypenny, two computer scientists, are the named inventors of the five patents. The inventors assigned their rights to Flinn. The complaint asserts five counts for each of the five patents, which claim priority dates of 2015 and 2016.

The 62-page complaint alleges direct infringement, induced infringement, and contributory infringement of the five patents by Anthropic’s Claude models that employ an attention-based transformer architecture. The asserted patents describe iterative neural-network architectures in which multiple attentions, representations, generated probabilities, and successive processing operations interact. Rather than merely directing a computer to produce a desired response, the disclosed architectures provide mechanisms through which the results of one processing stage may inform and alter later neural-network processing. The complaint alleges that the asserted patents contain over one thousand issued claims. Among these claims are claims directed to one or more of: (1) Foundation Model Architecture, Training, and Alignment; (2) Reasoning and Inference Control; (3) Memory and Personalization; (4) Retrieval, Search, and Grounding; (5) Agentic and Developer Workflows; and (6) Multimodal Processing and Generation. In May 2024, Anthropic’s interpretability team published research discussing analysis of Claude 3 Sonnet’s use of “attention heads,” the same attention mechanisms that are the foundational concept underlying the transformer architecture of the neural-network patents, according to the complaint. The timing of the complaint coincides with Anthropic’s scheduled IPO on November 18, 2026, with common stock expected to begin trading on November 19, 2026. The complaint alleges that Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate grew from approximately $10 billion in 2025 to approximately $65 billion by July 2026, with an estimated value of approximately $1 trillion. Anthropic built that business based on the architectures recited in the asserted parents, offering reasoning, retrieval, memory, coding, agentic, and multimodal capabilities that are recited by claims of the asserted patents, according to Flinn.

Relief sought. The complaint against Anthropic seeks a variety of damages and relief. Flinn seeks a judgment that Anthropic’s infringement of the patents has been willful, and an award of enhanced damages up to three times the amount found and attorney fees. In addition, the complaint seeks royalties for past infringement and ongoing infringement at a reasonable royalty rate determined by the court. In addition, Flinn asks for an accounting, attorney fees, costs, pre-judgment interest, post-judgment interest, and other relief.

Related litigation. In a related case also filed in the federal district court in Delaware, Flinn alleges patent infringement against OpenAI Opco LLC which owns and operates the ChatGPT AI platform. The related case is Flinn Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technologies LLC v. OpenAI Opco LLC, No. 1:26-cv-01455 (D. Del. Nov. 12, 2026).

The Case is No. 1:26-cv-01454-UNA.

Judge: NA.

Attorneys: Andrew Colin Mayo (Ashby & Geddes P.A.) for Flinn Artificial Intelligence [AI] Technologies, LLC.

Companies: Flinn Artificial Intelligence [AI] Technologies, LLC; Anthropic, PBC

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