The European Patent Office (EPO) reported on 25 September on the latest progress of IT co-operation within the European Patent Network: the programme, which began at the annual co-operation meeting in Kilkenny in 2019, now encompasses over 230 initiatives in European Patent Convention contracting states and partner offices, more than 180 of them already completed, and every EPC national office takes part in at least one activity. The shared capabilities built up so far span data quality and interoperability, search and AI-enabled tools, Front Office services and reusable Digital Tool Kit components. The latest working group meeting, held from 21 to 24 September, brought together EPO experts and around 150 participants from 36 national patent offices, alongside specialists from the EUIPO, WIPO and epi, with artificial intelligence featuring prominently.
Participants took stock of ANSERA-based Search (AbS), which now supports around 2700 examiners across 55 countries, and the EPC countries working group explored new capabilities such as enhanced API integrations and the Web Search Assistant, a browser extension that connects AbS with online resources.
The AI working group highlighted the Legal Interactive Platform (LIP), the AI-based OCR solution developed by the EPO and Mistral AI for processing patent documents, and the AI Playground for interacting with uploaded documents using large language models; sessions on APIs and interconnectors explored integration opportunities for translation, classification, OCR and filing services, and the Digital Tool Kit working group tested reusable solutions for preparing search reports and publications.
What matters is not any single tool but the trend: AI-assisted search and document processing are moving from internal aids at the EPO to infrastructure shared across the whole network, with examiners in 55 countries using the same search tool and components for search reports, translation, classification, OCR and e-filing gradually being shared as well.
For applicants this means that prior art searches are gaining in coverage and cross-lingual reach and that examination practice across national offices will tend to converge.
J&C recommends that companies filing in Europe build this trend into their drafting and search strategy: run pre-filing prior art searches with a wider scope and in several languages, and word the description and claims so that they hold up under cross-lingual searching and machine translation; make sure documents filed with the EPO and national offices are machine-readable text rather than image-only scans; and follow the EPO's public information on its AI tools, assessing confidentiality risk before uploading unpublished technical material to any AI platform.
Source: www.epo.org | www.epo.org
