@pipeworx/patents

Connect: https://gateway.pipeworx.io/patents/mcp · Install: one-click buttons

Tools: 4

The US Patent and Trademark Office’s patent database via the USPTO Open Data Portal (ODP, data.uspto.gov) — Pipeworx migrated off the legacy PatentsView API (api.patentsview.org, sunset 2025-05-01) on 2026-05-12. Search and retrieve granted US patents and published applications by keyword, assignee, inventor, or patent number. Free, no auth (platform key configured server-side; bring your own via _apiKey if you need your own quota — get one at https://data.uspto.gov/myodp).

Why this matters for AI agents

Patents are the public record of what’s been invented and who claims to have invented it. For competitive intelligence, IP due diligence, freedom-to-operate research, or technology landscaping, the USPTO is the source. What this pack actually returns: title, inventors/applicants, classification, filing/grant status and dates, prosecution events, and — via get_patent_assignments — recorded assignment/conveyance history. It does not return claims text or citation data; there is no get_claims or citation tool in this pack (the epo-ops pack’s get_claims does return claims text, but only for EPO-published records).

Two core flows:

1. Keyword search. “What patents exist for CRISPR gene editing?” → search_patents({query: "CRISPR gene editing"}) → matching applications/patents with title, application number, filing date, applicants, inventors, status, classification.

2. Specific patent. “What’s the status of application 16/123,456?” → get_patent({number: "16123456"}) → title, inventors, classification, status, and prosecution events (including the grant event/date if it has been granted). For who currently holds it, pair with get_patent_assignments({application_number: "16123456"}).

For company-level IP due diligence (combining patents with SEC IP risk disclosures and trademarks), see the Patent Due Diligence recipe.

Citable URI

pipeworx://uspto/patent/{number}

Patent numbers are stable forever. Embed in agent output as the canonical citation.

What “patents” includes

There’s no dedicated type input filter — every result carries a type field (application/patent type) you can filter on client-side to isolate design or plant patents from the utility-patent majority.

Update cadence

• Grants: measured, Tuesday. Querying granted_after for the current week (2026-09-08) returns grant dates of only 2026-09-01 and 2026-09-08 — both Tuesdays — confirming USPTO’s long-standing weekly grant-day cadence carried over from the PatentsView era. This is current data, not a stale mirror: the most recent grant date returned is today.
• Applications: unverified — do not repeat the old Thursday claim. ODP’s applicationMetaData exposes filingDate and grantDate but no publication date field, so Pipeworx has no way to check when an application record actually becomes visible in ODP. The PatentsView-era “Thursday” figure was for api.patentsview.org’s pgpub publication feed, which this pack does not use and cannot confirm carried over. Treat application-corpus freshness as unmeasured rather than assuming a fixed weekday.
• The default search looks old by construction, not because data is stale. With no granted_after/granted_before, search_patents returns the application corpus sorted newest-filed-first. USPTO doesn’t publish an application until ~18 months after filing and typically takes 2+ years to grant it, so the newest rows in an unfiltered search are recent filings with grant_date: null — that’s expected. Pass granted_after (e.g. "2024-01-01") to get issued patents with real grant dates instead. See the search_patents tool description for the full explanation.
• Pipeworx caches results with a 24-hour TTL. Given the measured Tuesday grant cadence, set Cache-Control: no-cache if you need same-day fresh-grant results.

Common pitfalls

• Keyword search ≠ freedom-to-operate. search_patents finds patents whose text mentions your terms. It does not tell you whether a patent CLAIMS what you’d be doing, and this pack does not return claims text to check that yourself — FTO requires reading claims (the epo-ops pack’s get_claims returns claims text, but only for EPO-published records) and, ultimately, a patent attorney.
• Assignee normalization. “Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc.”, “VERTEX PHARMACEUTICALS, INC.”, “Vertex Pharmaceuticals” — all the same company. Group case-insensitive after stripping legal suffixes when aggregating.
• No citation data. This pack does not surface citation counts or citation lists at all — there is no way to rank “most-cited” or “foundational” patents within a result set through this pack.
• This pack is US-only, but Pipeworx isn’t. USPTO covers US filings only. For European patents, the epo-ops pack is live today — epo_ops_search_patents, get_biblio, get_family, get_abstract, get_claims against the EPO’s worldwide register (verified live 2026-09-08: epo_ops_search_patents({query:"lithium battery"}) returned current European filings, including publications dated this week). Japanese (JPO) and Chinese (CNIPA) national filings are not in Pipeworx yet — file via pipeworx_feedback if you need them.
• Application vs. issued. “Patent pending” applications are searchable but the date you care about is grant_date, not filing_date. Applications can be rejected or amended; the issued patent is what matters.
• No patent-family data in this pack. Unlike epo-ops’s get_family (INPADOC family, worldwide), this USPTO pack does not return family-member data — get_patent covers a single US application/grant only. For “does this invention have foreign counterparts,” go through epo-ops instead.

Tools

• search_patents — Search USPTO patent applications and grants — without a granted_after/granted_before bound this returns the APPLICATION corpus sorted newest-FILED-first, not issued patents. USPTO publishes an
• get_patent — Fetch a single USPTO patent application/grant by application number (e.g., “16/123,456” or “16123456”). Returns full metadata: title, inventors, classifications, status, prosecution events. A returned
• search_inventors — Search USPTO patent applications by inventor last name. Returns matching applications with title, inventor list, and filing date — sorted newest-filed-first, so this is the APPLICATION corpus (same as
• get_patent_assignments — Retrieve USPTO-recorded assignment/conveyance history for one patent application from the migrated Open Data Portal endpoint. Returns assignors, assignees, execution/recording dates, conveyance text,