Company patents
Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC
Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC's patent strategy reveals a surprising shift away from core AI development, with Machine Learning & AI patents declining by 13.1% in 2025 and a significant 54.0% so far in 2026, despite it still being the largest category at 17.4% of their portfolio. Concurrently, there's an emerging focus on Computer Security, which saw a robust 42.4% growth in 2024 and an additional 11.1% in 2025, indicating a strategic pivot towards securing their extensive software and cloud ecosystem.
Patent Trend by Technology Area
Yearly patent publications since 2023
Product themes
Product-level themes inferred from filings since 2023, with category chips showing where each theme appears. Select a theme to filter the patents below.
12,253 US filings (since 2023) · 12 categories · 50 themes
Techniques for generating human-like text or other content using large pre-trained models, often involving prompt engineering, speculative decoding, or multi-modal inputs for content creation.
Methods and apparatus for improving the visual fidelity, resolution, or compression efficiency of video signals, often through advanced processing, up-scaling, or neural network-based filters.
User interface designs and systems that enable multiple users to interact with shared content, provide feedback, or coordinate activities, often across different devices or locations.
Systems and methods utilizing artificial intelligence, particularly large language models and neural networks, to extract, summarize, generate, or categorize information from unstructured or semi-structured data sources.
Methods and systems for improving the quality of video streams, generating intermediate frames, or continuously locating and following objects within a sequence of images, even under occlusion.
Systems that use user data, preferences, and machine learning to generate tailored advice, product recommendations, goal-setting plans, or contextual information for individuals across different domains.
Technologies enabling the creation and management of virtual computing environments, including virtual machines and virtual desktops, with an emphasis on secure and efficient remote access, updates, and performance.
Techniques for rendering, interacting with, and managing content within augmented or virtual reality environments, including spatial tracking, gaze interaction, and dynamic multi-application display management.
Systems and methods for authenticating users, devices, or applications, authorizing their access to resources based on policies, and managing digital identities across various platforms.
Methods and systems for efficiently allocating computing resources, balancing workloads, and managing power states to improve performance, reduce energy consumption, or enhance reliability in computing platforms.
Applying artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to enhance cryptographic systems, such as generating encryption models, improving zero-trust architectures, or enabling privacy-preserving computations like federated learning.
Technologies that create dynamic and interactive visual content for displays, including virtual/wearable systems, by generating overlays, replacing input streams, or merging real-time user actions with digital environments.
Mechanisms to facilitate the secure exchange of data between different entities or systems while enforcing usage policies, managing digital content rights, and ensuring data consistency during replication or transfer.
Tools and processes for assessing, monitoring, and improving the security configuration and external accessibility of resources deployed within cloud computing environments.
AI systems designed to engage in natural language dialogue, maintain conversation state, understand user intent, and generate relevant responses, often across multiple communication channels or modalities.
Methods and systems for integrating, transforming, and managing complex or domain-specific data from disparate sources into a unified structure, often for specific applications like social networks, genomics, or business forms.
Methods and systems for identifying, extracting, and structuring specific entities, relationships, or insights from text-based documents, often involving techniques like named entity recognition, relation extraction, or summarization.
Specialized hardware, architectural designs, and computational methods to improve the speed, efficiency, and security of artificial intelligence and machine learning model execution, particularly for inference and data processing.
Techniques utilizing deep learning models like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or diffusion models to create new images, modify existing ones, or generate synthetic data based on various inputs or conditions.
Techniques for monitoring system components and behaviors to anticipate failures, performance degradation, or anomalies, often leveraging machine learning for pattern recognition and forecasting.
Systems and methods for identifying and blocking unauthorized access, malicious activities, or abnormal behavior within a network by analyzing traffic, system logs, or behavioral patterns.
Systems that process data to provide personalized recommendations, predict events, or automate decision-making processes based on learned patterns, user behavior, or environmental factors.
Designing user interfaces and interaction methods specifically for mobile or wearable devices, enabling control of external systems, monitoring user states, or facilitating real-world transactions.
Systems and methods for automating the lifecycle of machine learning models, including pipeline deployment, model management, versioning, and configuring for different inference environments.
Developing and applying machine learning algorithms that leverage quantum computing principles, such as quantum circuits or autoencoders, for tasks like simulation or data processing.
Techniques for protecting data at rest or in backup, ensuring its integrity, confidentiality, and verifiable origin, often involving encryption, unique identifiers, or secure repositories.
Systems that combine data from multiple camera sensors or capture multiple images from different perspectives or qualities, often involving image processing techniques like synthesis to create enhanced or comprehensive views.
Development and optimization of novel neural network layers or architectures specifically designed to improve performance or efficiency for computer vision tasks.
Methods and apparatus for detecting objects and determining their three-dimensional position and orientation (pose) using imagery or point cloud data, often for navigation, surveying, or environmental understanding.
Methods and systems for displaying complex data in three-dimensional graphical formats, allowing users to manipulate, explore, and derive insights from the data through interactive controls.
Involves systems designed to automatically detect errors or failures and initiate predefined or intelligent corrective actions, recovery procedures, or notifications to minimize downtime and manual intervention.
Techniques for combining and analyzing information from multiple distinct data modalities (e.g., text, image, video, audio, sensor data) to derive richer insights or improve system performance and decision-making.
Systems and methods for automating multi-step tasks, business processes, or service interactions, often involving AI agents, programmable interfaces, or formal orchestration languages to streamline operations.
Techniques for combining data from disparate sensor types (e.g., cameras, radar, mobile device signals) to achieve a more robust and comprehensive understanding of an environment or subject, often leveraging machine learning for interpretation and correlation.
Encompasses strategies and technologies to ensure the availability, integrity, and recoverability of data and systems, including robust backup, replication, error correction, and efficient data restoration.
Utilizing machine learning, particularly deep learning, to analyze medical data such as images, sensor readings, or physiological signals for disease prediction, diagnosis, or treatment assessment.
Technologies for deploying, managing, and governing applications and services in cloud environments, particularly focusing on containerization, microservice architectures, API gateways, and distributed data management.
Technologies for establishing and maintaining secure communication channels between devices or networks, often employing encryption, secure protocols, or virtual private networks (VPNs).
Methods for training machine learning models across multiple decentralized devices or servers while keeping data localized, often involving aggregation of model parameters and secure communication.
Techniques and hardware architectures designed to efficiently generate and display complex 3D graphics, particularly for interactive applications like virtual reality, focusing on speed and visual quality.
Systems that employ imaging and image processing to automatically detect defects, verify states, or ensure quality control in manufactured goods, printed materials, or industrial processes.
Systems and methods designed to ensure adherence to regulatory rules, corporate policies, or contractual agreements, often involving automated validation of electronic transactions, smart contract enforcement, or API governance.
Techniques and hardware for autonomous systems to gather and interpret data about their surroundings, including obstacle detection, object recognition, and depth estimation, to inform control decisions.
Technologies for securing, managing, and transacting with virtual currencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and other blockchain-based digital assets, including hardware wallets and tokenization schemes for various purposes.
Systems designed to streamline and automate various commercial transactions, including mobile-enhanced processes, secure online checkouts, customer service interactions, and privilege issuance, often leveraging digital authentication.
Algorithms and systems for generating, optimizing, and executing trajectories for autonomous vehicles or robots to move through an environment, often involving obstacle avoidance, route validation, and goal reaching.
Processes for creating or manipulating three-dimensional digital representations of objects or environments, including mesh generation, surface fitting, and depth estimation from multiple views.
Focuses on establishing and enforcing quality standards for software development, deployment, and infrastructure configuration, utilizing automated validation, testing, and governance frameworks.
Technologies that process, analyze, and leverage geographic information system (GIS) data, location data, and spatial analytics for applications such as monitoring, navigation, and environmental assessment.
Specialized cybersecurity solutions designed to protect industrial control systems (ICS), SCADA networks, and other operational technology environments from cyber threats and unauthorized access.
Patents
Showing 1-10 of 401
Predictive System Health