Child Safety Content Detection Patents: Leaders & Trends 2026
Child Safety and Illegal Content Detection Patents: Who Holds the Hash-Matching Claims
36.7% concentration at the top. The five leading assignees hold 47 of 128 records in scope, a level of concentration that narrows the room for a new entrant to claim core hash-matching methods cleanly. Filings rose from 2 in 2017 to a peak of 23 in 2022, then settled into a still-elevated band; the 2021-to-2024 span shows +38% growth (13 to 18 filings), a figure that excludes the most recent, still-incomplete years.
- 1SNAP INC14
- 2THE NIELSEN CO (US) LLC11
- 3INNOVASOFT TECH HOLDINGS LTD10
- 4COMMVAULT SYSTEMS INC6
- 5ARM LTD6
See the full child safety and illegal content detection 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 this patent landscape
Who holds the most patents in child safety and illegal content detection?
Within this dataset of 128 records, one assignee leads with 14 records, ahead of a fifth-place holder at 6 and a tenth-place holder at 4. The top five assignees together account for 47 records, or 36.7% of all 128 in scope, and the top ten account for 71, or 55.5%. That leaves a long tail of companies with only one or a handful of filings each, so the field has a clear leader but is not dominated by a single player.
What technologies do these patents actually cover?
The search scope combines perceptual hashing, image hash matching and hash database techniques with the operational problems that make them work in production, including hash collision handling, editing robustness, privacy-preserving matching, similarity thresholds and encrypted matching. In practice this covers the plumbing behind systems that flag known illegal or harmful content without exposing the content itself. Roughly 54% of records classify under general digital data processing (G06F) and 29% under image or video recognition (G06V).
Is patent filing activity in this area growing or slowing down?
Filing activity grew from 2 records in 2017 to a peak of 23 in 2022, and the most recent complete three-year span shows +38% growth from 13 filings in 2021 to 18 in 2024. Figures for 2025 and 2026 appear lower, but that reflects the roughly 18-month lag between filing and publication rather than an actual slowdown. Read any apparent dip in the final two years as incomplete data, not a trend reversal.
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 Child Safety and Illegal Content Detection covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. 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.