Setting aside the tech, which looks like an asynchronous await across a network, the interesting question is why Mistral would patent this in the US.
Simple, because the patent is less about protecting an invention than doing business in the US.
The US is more hospitable to software patents than Europe. A US patent also gives Mistral something useful when dealing with companies that already hold large patent portfolios: defensive leverage, cross-licensing, and one more asset on the books to make it attractive to investors.
There's a certain absurdity to it, and the French have a history with absurd. A French open-weights company crosses the Atlantic to put a patent around a loop, not because the code is remarkable, but because the American market makes the loop a valuable asset, business-wise.
Ekaros 2 hours ago [-]
Do software patents only exist for rich players to build a moat against poorer players? At this point with patents of this quality only reason for them to exist seems to be to cross-license them for extra revenue and to possibly block anyone too poor to fight for themselves...
elil17 21 minutes ago [-]
Software patents are probably unenforceable in most cases, at least in the US and Europe, are essentially unenforceable. The European Patent Office, very sensibly, denies software patents.
The USPTO has a strange insistence on granting them even though they aren't legally valid. Therefore, if you have a lot of money, you might file a software patent for one of four reasons:
1) You hope that the US courts might one day change their minds and start enforcing software patents.
2) You hope that you might scare people in to giving you licensing fees even though you know the patent won't be enforced.
3) You want to prevent others from scaring you in to giving them licensing fees.
4) You want to get a patent because it's impressive/looks good on your resume.
mizzao 11 minutes ago [-]
Also, corollary from the above: you want to make lawyers happy in an acquisition because of the above, which allows you to sell for more $
bonoboTP 1 hours ago [-]
Almost all these patents exist as a war chest and a deterrent against other companies. Everyone theoretically perpetually infringes on each other's obscure patents all the time, but there is a detente between the big players because they hold the gun to each other's heads. If you as a small guy enter the game, you're just shot.
flowerthoughts 53 minutes ago [-]
It builds corporate value. If you end up with a portfolio of patents that someone might want to acquire, you've just created a new market for your company. Individual software patents of common quality probably don't matter.
rayiner 1 hours ago [-]
Economically, it’s to avoid free-rider effects. This benefit largely seems alien to tech people because the industry inherently has other moats: network effects, data and code in a server instead of a product sold to consumers that competitors can easily disassemble and reverse engineer, etc.
moomin 26 minutes ago [-]
The real truth is that's how Edison used them and they've been the primary use of patents since inception.
watwut 32 minutes ago [-]
Mistral is not a rich player in the context of AI. It is minor smaller company, basically.
rusk 1 hours ago [-]
Precisely the reason is to give breathing room for big players to invest in development of technology so they can capitalise exclusively for a period
wyzer 1 hours ago [-]
They exist so you can not be forbidden to do what you invented.. but there might be unintended correlation ;)
GuB-42 1 hours ago [-]
I don't disagree, but Mistral is hardly a "rich player" in the current AI bubble.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and X are each valued at a trillion or more. Mistral is valued at $20B, 50x less. Even Deepseek is several times bigger than Mistral.
Ekaros 1 hours ago [-]
What a time we live in when 20 billion is considered poor... I would consider companies in sub million range to be poor and that is charitable already...
GuB-42 50 minutes ago [-]
The time we live in is a bubble. Cursor, a company that developed a fork of VSCode that uses AI models they don't own on hardware they don't own got bought for $60B, compare with JetBrains, a company that actually makes some of the best if not the best IDEs in several languages is "only" worth $7B.
$20B is certainly not poor, but in the world of AI and overinflated valuations, it almost is.
watwut 30 minutes ago [-]
The big one believes themselves ready to rival "government power"
You pay the lawyer in thousands to use a language which meets the criteria for the patent. Thousands of software patents are repetition of each other with some thing in particular worded differently
CodesInChaos 1 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately there are many patents that simply combine an old thing with a new thing in the obvious way. Since the new thing is new, the combination is "novel".
Improvements in existing tech can be patented. An RPC call that an AI writes for itself and then executes is a novelty from prior art. Whether it’s non-obvious is up for debate but if it gets past the patent officer that debate happens via lawsuit
everforward 18 minutes ago [-]
There is _some_ prior art here, though it’s not direct. This is very similar in concept to the joke Python extensions that replaced the global exception handler with one that invokes an LLM.
There are “workflows” that are very similar. Ie I can invoke a Python function that doesn’t exist and the exception gets handed off to an LLM to make it work by making that function exist.
This is functionally similar from what I can gather. Invoke a tool that doesn’t exist, we’ll make it exist for you.
It’ll probably get a patent issued, though, the patent office seems asleep at the wheel in the tech space at least.
williamcotton 59 minutes ago [-]
> but if it gets past the patent officer that debate happens via lawsuit
Or an Inter Partes Review!
c7b 2 hours ago [-]
Seems that this is a patent application from March, so a challenge should still be possible. But it would have to come from a named entity afaik (not a lawyer).
Roark66 1 hours ago [-]
It is quite funny an EU company patenting a software feature that is basically unpatentable in EU in the US.
Clearly this is an attempt to prevent similar patents from being weaponised against them in the US.
No one cares about such stuff in Europe.
st_goliath 24 minutes ago [-]
You may have heard about a little thing called MP3? Basically, Fraunhofer in Germany filed for (software) patents in the US. They made sure to wait some time for MP3 to become a thing before they started going after people and collect royalties.
Unfortunately patent offices are using loopholes that reintroduce software patents. Patent law says that a pure software patent is not possible, it has to be combined with a specific hardware application to make it an invention. So they fill in a patent for "XX implemented on a hardware operating on land, in the air, in space, on, or under water.". That's essentially a software patent.
skeledrew 30 minutes ago [-]
But... why? Isn't that what smolagents[0] has done from the beginning? Also this move is blackening Mistral in my book.
I have prior art, there's a ton of prior art GitHub, good luck with that patent.
maeln 2 hours ago [-]
How is the US patent registry easy to search ? I would be curious to see the patent registration of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.
One way or another, I do fully expect every of those companies to try to fill these kinds of "almost for sure invalid and overturnable" patent as a way to defend themselves from every other actor (the classic "Oh I infringed on your patent ? Well here are some of MY patent you are infringing on, so let's call it a day").
This is markedly better than the USPTO website, FWIW.
kwertyoowiyop 1 hours ago [-]
Is “by an LLM” the new “on a computer” for lame patents?
nrabulinski 2 hours ago [-]
Patent for the most basic pattern seen in literally all of software engineering
plufz 2 hours ago [-]
Or it’s a patent for ”a method” of doing that, that is much more specific?
d-us-vb 1 hours ago [-]
The question is whether the method is sufficiently novel or specific enough to the problems/difficulties of solving a specific domain’s problems to warrant a patent.
It’s one of those kinds of patents i assume I’m violating every 100 lines of code I write.
It should be embarrassing and shameful to apply for such a trivial patent.
CodesInChaos 1 hours ago [-]
Businesses know no shame, if applying for a trivial patent is useful, they will of course do so.
The real problem is patents which are trivial and/broad being granted.
tokarf 56 minutes ago [-]
Not the first time, not the last time in US patent history ...
derektank 1 hours ago [-]
“Claude, please review my repo for any work that could be novel enough to receive a patent. Be liberal in your definition of ‘novel’”
QuantumNomad_ 1 hours ago [-]
I know it’s a joke, but it does make me wonder if LLMs would even be good at assessing if an idea is “novel”.
I only have a rudimentary understanding of how neural networks work, but I wonder if rather than “understanding” what “novel” really means to humans, an LLM would be most likely to agree that something was novel based on having seen that specifically referred to as novel in its training data.
So that if you give it an example of something that already exists, but which was very recently invented at the point in time when the LLM was trained, and you ask “is this a novel idea?” that because it had several sources in its training data describing that idea as novel, it would say “yes that’s a novel idea”. Whereas what we really meant was to ask it if someone else had already thought of this thing prior to us right now in this later moment.
And then on the other hand, even if something was “novel” at the point in time when the LLM was trained, perhaps we would fare better to ask it “has anyone thought of this?” rather than asking if the idea is “novel”? And that even though it considers the idea novel in a way it would also be able to say that yes this has already been thought of.
I read somewhere that the US Patent Office is like a candy store for other countries to pick up cool tech and continue local development.
_jayhack_ 45 minutes ago [-]
Likely from Palmer Luckey, who coined the term 'Chinese instruction manuals'
jooops1 1 hours ago [-]
Can there be consequences for those who grant those patents? It seems the primary examiner Brian W Wathen also granted prior Art patents to Salesforce and NCR Voyix as well.
sarjann 59 minutes ago [-]
I do wonder if we need a charitable foundation that does software patents and makes them freely available just to stop cockroaches abusing patents.
Another step (although governance would need to be super good for this). Would be for this charity to withold access to these patents from companies that decide to abuse stupid patents.
I think you do not need to register a patent, you can just publish the idea with a verifiable date, that could be considered as a "prior art". I would suggest to make a free website where anyone can publish any ideas although I do not understand how one can prove the publish date. And then the community could publish everything that might be potentially invented in near future to prevent others from getting a patent.
For example, I would publish the idea of a "self-driving car" that can drive without or with minimal human supervision using a computer. I believe this is pretty novel and can be called an invention.
Also I hope this patent is valid only in US and cannot be enforced in China.
alerighi 15 minutes ago [-]
The problem is that it doesn't work as such. We all know that Meucci invented the telephone but Bell patented it.
The patent office rarely care about it, they register whatever you want, and then lawyers of companies can sue you for using it without permission. Of course you can fight it in court and affirm it's prior art, if you have enough money to pay your lawyer, and do you have more money than OpenAI, Meta, Google? Probably not, so they will just shut you down, that is the sole reason for patents to exist, to preserve monopoly of big multinational companies.
And nowadays that patents are probably written and submitted not even by human but by AI, what stops a big tech with enough money for using a model to generate millions of trivial patent, submit them, and get them approved, for then another AI to search for their usage and sue you for using it?
Topfi 1 hours ago [-]
Still pending, or am I mistaken? Can anyone with knowledge on the US process make an estimate how likely this is to go through? I know of Uniloc and their "efforts", is there a possibility that this could take a similarly damaging path?
tokarf 1 hours ago [-]
Cocorico !! Well played Mistral !
Really funny since software patents does not exist in France ...
conradfr 2 hours ago [-]
The irony is that it's not probably not patentable in Europe.
sam1r 1 hours ago [-]
Can somebody care to explain if the 2013 and 2006 refer to IDs or reference to past years.
rvz 2 hours ago [-]
This is just an RPC with JSON being passed around like a messaging system.
So we are just vibe patenting rubbish and rebranding it with AI?
InsideOutSanta 2 hours ago [-]
> So we are just vibe patenting rubbish and rebranding it with AI?
"Patenting rubbish" is a description of pretty much all software patents since forever.
skeledrew 26 minutes ago [-]
Patenting is itself rubbish.
CodesInChaos 58 minutes ago [-]
It's closer to a trojan horse talking to its C&C server than a typical RPC scenario.
In particular it's the server telling the client to execute arbitrary code in response to a request from the client.
amberjack 1 hours ago [-]
EU AI innovation is really amazing.
krautburglar 34 minutes ago [-]
AI companies business model is that peasants don’t have intellectual property. Everyone who contributed to this filing should be publicly spat upon and shunned.
mlinhares 2 hours ago [-]
what an insane thing to have a patent for.
_pdp_ 1 hours ago [-]
Plenty of previous art.
hhh 1 hours ago [-]
no shot my gpt-3 discord chatbot that did this beats it as prior art
butterisgood 1 hours ago [-]
TONS of prior art.
monster_truck 1 hours ago [-]
These don't really do anything, its just investement bait/participation trophies.
Once worked at a startup with a legendary dumbass who would tell anyone who listened about their patent for URL routing in javascript. Please don't hurt yourself rolling your eyes
truthbe 50 minutes ago [-]
Never liked the French..
nicman23 2 hours ago [-]
that is just ipc
dwedge 2 hours ago [-]
Mistral has set off my stink test for a while now, they seem to be a "friendly EU AI provider" who are really an EU mouthpiece for regulation and stifling competition instead of actually innovating
Edit: downvote if you want, but here's another example: "Companies selling artificial intelligence models in Europe should pay a "levy" to support cultural industries, the head of French developer Mistral said on Friday, March 20." https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/03/20/m...
Roark66 1 hours ago [-]
This will not fly anywhere outside France Polish here and the very first question I have is "who would decide which cultural industry representatives would get the money"? And what right the decision makers have to decide that. How about they send few k EUR a month to my friend who is a struggling painter :-D
Somehow I doubt that will happen.
It reminds me of those taxes on CD-R disks to support "Art associations" that were proposed before.
Voices like this are useful to spark a debate on AI basically taking content owned by other people and selling it, but no one will agree to implement anything like what is proposed.
dwedge 1 hours ago [-]
> This will not fly anywhere outside France Polish here
> It reminds me of those taxes on CD-R disks to support "Art associations" that were proposed before.
I find it funny when citizens of a country say things like this. Are you unaware that the Polish government brought in the same tax, 1-3%, on smartphones, laptops, desktop computers and SD cards from November this year? https://tvn24.pl/biznes/tech/nowa-oplata-od-smartfonow-table...
realusername 1 hours ago [-]
> It reminds me of those taxes on CD-R disks to support "Art associations" that were proposed before.
They're not just proposed, they are implemented in a lot of countries and France actually has the highest CD tax in the EU (and probably in the world but I haven't checked)
alansaber 34 minutes ago [-]
There are many ways for a business to survive outside of innovation
shakna 1 hours ago [-]
Mistral aren't an EU mouthpiece. They're a startup backed by Microsoft, nVidia, and Salesforce.
realusername 1 hours ago [-]
They all do that, when OpenAI reached a licensing deal with Reddit, it's to prevent less financially capable competitors to enter the market. (And I'm not saying that's right either)
2 hours ago [-]
baalimago 1 hours ago [-]
So without sandbox: it doesn't apply. Without explicit tool approval step: it doesn't apply. Response in xml: it doesn't apply.
What is the point?
wannabe44 2 hours ago [-]
I come up with at least two ideas like this every time I sit down in the toilet to poop.
sam1r 1 hours ago [-]
One could also have their preferred AI draft + deploy the white paper prior to flush.
redsocksfan45 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
GrayHerring 1 hours ago [-]
I'd like to patent the term "disadvertisement" and use this as a prime example.
Rendered at 15:17:08 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
Simple, because the patent is less about protecting an invention than doing business in the US.
The US is more hospitable to software patents than Europe. A US patent also gives Mistral something useful when dealing with companies that already hold large patent portfolios: defensive leverage, cross-licensing, and one more asset on the books to make it attractive to investors.
There's a certain absurdity to it, and the French have a history with absurd. A French open-weights company crosses the Atlantic to put a patent around a loop, not because the code is remarkable, but because the American market makes the loop a valuable asset, business-wise.
The USPTO has a strange insistence on granting them even though they aren't legally valid. Therefore, if you have a lot of money, you might file a software patent for one of four reasons:
1) You hope that the US courts might one day change their minds and start enforcing software patents.
2) You hope that you might scare people in to giving you licensing fees even though you know the patent won't be enforced.
3) You want to prevent others from scaring you in to giving them licensing fees.
4) You want to get a patent because it's impressive/looks good on your resume.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and X are each valued at a trillion or more. Mistral is valued at $20B, 50x less. Even Deepseek is several times bigger than Mistral.
$20B is certainly not poor, but in the world of AI and overinflated valuations, it almost is.
Btw, OpenAI words, not mine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49232778
There are “workflows” that are very similar. Ie I can invoke a Python function that doesn’t exist and the exception gets handed off to an LLM to make it work by making that function exist.
This is functionally similar from what I can gather. Invoke a tool that doesn’t exist, we’ll make it exist for you.
It’ll probably get a patent issued, though, the patent office seems asleep at the wheel in the tech space at least.
Or an Inter Partes Review!
Clearly this is an attempt to prevent similar patents from being weaponised against them in the US.
No one cares about such stuff in Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing,_ownership,_and_...
[0] https://github.com/huggingface/smolagents
It’s one of those kinds of patents i assume I’m violating every 100 lines of code I write.
Patent was applied for 04.03.2026. langgraph-codeact _shipped_ this capability in February.
[0]: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-us...
[1]: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/tools-programm...
The real problem is patents which are trivial and/broad being granted.
I only have a rudimentary understanding of how neural networks work, but I wonder if rather than “understanding” what “novel” really means to humans, an LLM would be most likely to agree that something was novel based on having seen that specifically referred to as novel in its training data.
So that if you give it an example of something that already exists, but which was very recently invented at the point in time when the LLM was trained, and you ask “is this a novel idea?” that because it had several sources in its training data describing that idea as novel, it would say “yes that’s a novel idea”. Whereas what we really meant was to ask it if someone else had already thought of this thing prior to us right now in this later moment.
And then on the other hand, even if something was “novel” at the point in time when the LLM was trained, perhaps we would fare better to ask it “has anyone thought of this?” rather than asking if the idea is “novel”? And that even though it considers the idea novel in a way it would also be able to say that yes this has already been thought of.
Another step (although governance would need to be super good for this). Would be for this charity to withold access to these patents from companies that decide to abuse stupid patents.
For example, I would publish the idea of a "self-driving car" that can drive without or with minimal human supervision using a computer. I believe this is pretty novel and can be called an invention.
Also I hope this patent is valid only in US and cannot be enforced in China.
The patent office rarely care about it, they register whatever you want, and then lawyers of companies can sue you for using it without permission. Of course you can fight it in court and affirm it's prior art, if you have enough money to pay your lawyer, and do you have more money than OpenAI, Meta, Google? Probably not, so they will just shut you down, that is the sole reason for patents to exist, to preserve monopoly of big multinational companies.
And nowadays that patents are probably written and submitted not even by human but by AI, what stops a big tech with enough money for using a model to generate millions of trivial patent, submit them, and get them approved, for then another AI to search for their usage and sue you for using it?
So we are just vibe patenting rubbish and rebranding it with AI?
"Patenting rubbish" is a description of pretty much all software patents since forever.
In particular it's the server telling the client to execute arbitrary code in response to a request from the client.
Once worked at a startup with a legendary dumbass who would tell anyone who listened about their patent for URL routing in javascript. Please don't hurt yourself rolling your eyes
Edit: downvote if you want, but here's another example: "Companies selling artificial intelligence models in Europe should pay a "levy" to support cultural industries, the head of French developer Mistral said on Friday, March 20." https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/03/20/m...
Somehow I doubt that will happen.
It reminds me of those taxes on CD-R disks to support "Art associations" that were proposed before.
Voices like this are useful to spark a debate on AI basically taking content owned by other people and selling it, but no one will agree to implement anything like what is proposed.
> It reminds me of those taxes on CD-R disks to support "Art associations" that were proposed before.
I find it funny when citizens of a country say things like this. Are you unaware that the Polish government brought in the same tax, 1-3%, on smartphones, laptops, desktop computers and SD cards from November this year? https://tvn24.pl/biznes/tech/nowa-oplata-od-smartfonow-table...
They're not just proposed, they are implemented in a lot of countries and France actually has the highest CD tax in the EU (and probably in the world but I haven't checked)
What is the point?