AI Safety & Assurance Patents: Who Leads, Where the Gaps Are 2026
AI Safety, Evaluation & Assurance Patents: Who Is Filing and Where the Field Is Still Open
27.2% concentration at the top. The five most active filers account for 100 of the 368 records in scope, but a long tail of single- and few-filing entrants fills out the rest of the ranking. Filings climbed from zero in 2017 to a peak of 102 in 2025, with growth of 46% between 2021 (46 records) and 2024 (67 records) — the most recent span that can be read as complete. 2026 is running at 53 records so far, a partial-year figure that will rise as later publications land.
- 1IQ CONSULTING COMPANY7.6%
- 2FORT ROBOTICS INC7.1%
- 3NOKIA TECHNOLOGIES OY5.4%
- 4FUJITSU LTD3.8%
- 5INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINE CORPORATION3.3%
See the full ai safety, evaluation & assurance patent landscape analysis in Eureka
- The complete ranking, not just the top five
- Every IPC branch with its share of the corpus
- The most-cited records, and where claim space is still thin
Common questions about AI safety and assurance patents
How many AI safety and assurance patents have been filed?
This dataset identifies 368 published records matching AI safety, model assurance and trustworthy-AI language combined with core machine-learning implementation terms, covering filings from 2015 through the August 2026 data cut-off. That figure counts published patent documents and applications, not granted patents specifically, and it will keep growing as more recent filings publish. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the true 2025 and 2026 totals are higher than what is currently visible.
Who are the leading companies filing AI safety patents?
The assignee ranking covers 100 companies counted by record, with the leader holding 28 records ahead of a fifth-place company at 12 and a tenth-place company at 7. The top five combined account for 27.2% of all 368 records in scope, and the top ten reach 38.3%, which means the field has a clear leading group but no single dominant owner of the technology. The remainder of the ranking is a long tail of companies with a handful of filings each.
Is the AI safety patent field growing or slowing down?
Filing volume grew 46% between 2021 (46 records) and 2024 (67 records), the most recent span that can be treated as a complete comparison. Headline figures for 2025 (102 records) and 2026 (53 records so far) look like a plateau or decline, but that is an artefact of publication lag rather than an actual slowdown — patent applications typically take about 18 months to publish, so recent years are still filling in. Nothing in this data supports describing the field as cooling.
Disclaimer. This analysis is based on Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent records and is provided for general information and reference only. Patent data carries inherent limitations — recent filings are under-counted because of publication lag, counts may be on a record or family basis, classification and applicant-name data may contain errors or duplicates, and the underlying search query defines the scope shown — so the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing here is an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Verify independently and review with qualified patent and legal professionals before acting on it.
Method: Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on AI Safety, Evaluation & Assurance Patent Landscape covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-08-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish. Every share divides by all records in scope. Data: Patsnap Eureka. See the full landscape report.