USPTO Patents — Patent and Application Search

The US Patent and Trademark Office's patent database via the PatentsView API. Search and retrieve granted US patents (and published applications) by keyword, assignee, inventor, or patent number. ~12 million issued patents going back to 1976. Free, no auth.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1476+ live data sources.

Why this matters for AI agents

Patents are the public record of what's been invented and who claims to have invented it. For competitive intelligence, IP due diligence, freedom-to-operate research, or technology landscaping, the USPTO is the source. The data is structured: claims, citations, family members, prosecution history, assignment changes.

Two core flows:

1. Keyword search. "What patents exist for CRISPR gene editing?" → search_patents({query: "CRISPR gene editing"}) → top patents by relevance with title, abstract, assignee, filing date, patent number.

2. Specific patent. "What's in patent US 10,123,456?" → get_patent({number: "US10123456"}) → full record: claims, citations, family, current owner.

For company-level IP due diligence (combining patents with SEC IP risk disclosures and trademarks), see the Patent Due Diligence recipe.

Citable URI

pipeworx://uspto/patent/{number}

Patent numbers are stable forever. Embed in agent output as the canonical citation.

What "patents" includes

Type	Prefix	What it is
Utility patent	(none / numeric)	Standard invention patent (machines, processes, articles)
Design patent	D	Ornamental design (e.g., D123,456 = a chair design)
Plant patent	PP	Asexually reproduced plant variety
Reissue	RE	Corrected version of an earlier patent
Reexamination	(E numbers)	Validity-challenged patents under review

The default search returns utility patents. For design or plant patents, filter by type in results.

Update cadence

New patents publish on Tuesdays (USPTO's grant-day cadence).
New applications publish on Thursdays.
Pipeworx caches results with 24-hour TTL — fine for almost all use cases. For Tuesday-morning fresh-grant news, set Cache-Control: no-cache.

Common pitfalls

Keyword search ≠ freedom-to-operate. search_patents finds patents whose text mentions your terms. It does not tell you whether a patent CLAIMS what you'd be doing. FTO requires reading claims carefully — Pipeworx returns them, but interpretation needs a patent attorney.
Assignee normalization. "Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc.", "VERTEX PHARMACEUTICALS, INC.", "Vertex Pharmaceuticals" — all the same company. Group case-insensitive after stripping legal suffixes when aggregating.
Citation density signal. Most-cited patents within a search result are usually the foundational ones. Their citation count is in the patent record — sort by it for "what are the canonical patents in this area."
Foreign filings absent. USPTO is US-only. For European, Japanese, or Chinese patents, you need EPO, JPO, or CNIPA — not currently in Pipeworx. File via pipeworx_feedback if you need them.
Application vs. issued. "Patent pending" applications are searchable but the date you care about is grant_date, not filing_date. Applications can be rejected or amended; the issued patent is what matters.
Patent family. Most patents have foreign counterparts (the "family"). The full record lists family members. For a complete picture of a single invention's protection, look at the family across all jurisdictions.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "patents": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/patents/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/patents/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1476+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Patents data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

License

MIT

Patents