The most valuable intellectual property in your business is often not the product your customers see — it’s the platform underneath it: the data it learned from, the delivery technology it rides on, the foundational patents everything else is built over. Several developments this past week show what happens when someone owns those foundations, and what it costs to build on foundations you don’t. The pattern matters to any business deploying AI or building on licensed technology, which now means almost everyone.

The AI copyright lawsuit wave reaches the inputs

Major publishers including Hachette, Cengage and Elsevier, joined by authors, filed a class action against Google in New York on 14 July, alleging Gemini was trained on millions of copyrighted books — including works originally digitised under the old Google Books arrangements (coverage here). Whether AI can lawfully train on copyrighted material is being decided case by case, but the strategic point doesn’t need to wait for judgment: training data provenance is now a balance-sheet issue. If you licence AI models, ask your vendor to warrant where the data came from and to indemnify you. If you own content, it just became a licensable input with a market forming around it — the theme I explored in The Price Signal for AI Training Data Just Got Louder and The Licence to Train: Brussels Reopens the Copyright Bargain.

Platform patents outlive the product race

Sanofi sued both Pfizer and Moderna in New Jersey this week over lipid nanoparticle delivery patents — the technology that gets mRNA into cells — asserting ten patents against Moderna’s vaccines and eight against Comirnaty (Bloomberg Law’s report). Two details reward attention. The patents arrived with Sanofi’s 2021 acquisition of Translate Bio, and the suits seek royalties and damages, not injunctions. Sanofi lost the mRNA product race; it may still tax the winners, because it owns part of the platform. That is patent licensing as a revenue line — the posture I examined in When Your IP Becomes a Revenue Line: Three Signals From the Past Week. Audit your own portfolio the same way: which of your patents read on what competitors ship, not just on what you ship?

The generative AI patent race is compounding

WIPO’s new patent landscape report (14 July) found generative AI patent activity nearly tripled in two years, with more GenAI patents published in 2024–25 than in the entire preceding decade, and China-based filers leading (analysis here). Most companies are deploying AI; a much smaller group is filing patents around what they build with it. The gap between those two groups is tomorrow’s licensing market, with the same dynamics Sanofi is demonstrating today. Using the tools is not a moat — as I argued in AI Isn’t Your Advantage—Your IP Strategy Is.

Three questions for your next IP strategy review

First: can every AI vendor in your stack warrant its training data provenance — and who carries the liability if it can’t?

Second: which platform technologies does your business rent rather than own, and what would a royalty demand on them do to your margins?

Third: what did you actually file in the past twelve months around your AI-enabled products and processes?

The week’s developments all point the same way: the returns in the AI economy are accruing to whoever owns the foundations and can prove it. The filings, licences and provenance records being created right now will decide who gets paid for the platform for the next decade. Make sure some of them are yours.