Newshot Anthropic and OpenAI Hit with Patent Lawsuits Alleging Infringement of Five Neural Network Technology Patents
IT Home, November 13 — On November 12 local time, the U.S. company Flinn Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technologies LLC (hereinafter Flinn AI) filed two patent infringement lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, naming Anthropic PBC and OpenAI OpCo as co-defendants and accusing both companies of infringing five neural network-related patents it holds.
At the same time, a group of nonprofit organizations has also sued OpenAI, Anthropico, Meta, Google and SpaceXAI and other companies, in an effort to further block these enterprises from developing advanced AI models.
The two Flinn AI lawsuits are Flinn AI Technologies LLC v. Anthropic PBC (Case No. 1:26-cv-01454) and Flinn AI Technologies LLC v. OpenAI OpCo LLC (Case No. 1:26-cv-01455).
Flinn AI alleges that both companies infringed five patents jointly invented by computer scientists 史蒂文 弗林 (Steven Flinn) and 娜奥米 曼尼佩尼 (Naomi Moneypenny).
The complaints state that the relevant inventions date back to late 2015 and early 2016, when Flinn and 曼尼佩尼 filed the relevant patent applications. These patents cover attention-based neural network training and processing technology, which Flinn AI contends provides the technical foundation for related functions in modern generative AI systems.
According to Law360, the five U.S. patents at issue are numbered US 12,223,404, US 12,327,166, US 12,462,197, US 12,462,198 and US 12,511,580, all titled Iterative attention-based neural network training and processing.
The lawsuit against Anthropic mainly concerns the Claude series of large language models. Flinn AI states in its complaint that as the Claude models and related products continue to iterate and scale, Anthropic's attention mechanism inference, retrieval, memory, agent and multimodal functions have become increasingly advanced, and the relevant systems continue to infringe the patents at issue.
The complaint against OpenAI makes similar allegations, arguing that as the company's models and related functions continue to be upgraded, its patent infringement is also ongoing.
In addition, Flinn also founded ManyWorlds Inc., and 曼尼佩尼 later joined that company as well. IT Home noted that since the beginning of this year, a similarly named Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC has also sued OpenAI and Spotify over patent issues.
According to public litigation records, the company sued Spotify in April 2026 and filed another lawsuit against OpenAI in August in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, involving a different set of patents.
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