DeepSeek's Pro-China Bias is Superficial: Revealing the Power of Local AI Deployment

Today, something a little different for this blog.  As many readers are aware, for the past couple of years I have been working towards a PhD in which, very broadly speaking, I have been looking at applying machine learning, AI and language models to the analysis of patent claims (in particular, to assessing the scope of claims).  Most recently, I have been exploring how it might be possible to apply large language models – the types of AI behind popular chat services such as Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude (my personal chatbot of choice), Meta’s LLaMa and (yes) Chinese newcomer DeepSeek – to this task.  To experiment with ‘open source’ (or, more accurately, ‘open weights’) versions of some of these models, I have built my own combination of hardware and software.  The process has been very interesting!

The emergence of powerful open-source large language models (LLMs) has democratised access to cutting-edge AI technology, but concerns about potential biases and restrictions embedded within these models persist.  I've been experimenting with DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B, a distilled (smaller) version of the larger DeepSeek-R1 model developed by Chinese AI company DeepSeek.  And what I've discovered is that the widely reported pro-China bias in this model appears to be remarkably superficial and easily circumvented through local deployment and simple prompt engineering techniques.

This has significant implications for organisations concerned about potential surveillance or ideological constraints when utilising Chinese-developed AI models.  By running these models locally with appropriate system prompts, it's possible to unlock their full capabilities while maintaining complete control over input and output – effectively neutralising superficial safeguards, while keeping confidential information and intellectual property safe (so, yes, there is an IP element to this article).

To find out a bit more about what I did, and what I found, please read on.

 Read full article ► 

Tags: Artificial intelligence, China, Large Language Models, Machine learning

Patent Applicants 2024– China Outfiles Australian Residents While LG Maintains Individual Lead

My latest analysis of patent filing data for 2024 confirms a shift that has been years in the making – Chinese applicants have finally overtaken Australian residents to become the second largest source of patent applications, behind only the United States.  This milestone comes as US filings showed a notable decline of 5.7%, while Chinese applications continued their steady growth with a 7.2% increase over the previous year.

Among individual applicants, LG Electronics maintained its position at the top of the table with 229 filings, extending its lead over second-placed Huawei.  The healthcare and medical sector showed particular strength, with companies like Regeneron Pharmaceuticals making substantial gains in the rankings.  Meanwhile, the technology sector saw some significant changes, including the departure of IBM from the top 30 applicants after a brief period of increased activity.

Analysis of the data by industry sector reveals some clear trends, with healthcare and medical applications showing strong growth while technology sector filings declined overall.  However, these broad patterns mask considerable variation at the individual company level, suggesting that strategic considerations, rather than general market conditions, may be driving filing decisions for many of the leading applicants.

So let’s take a look at the numbers in more detail.

 Read full article ► 

Tags: Annual patent data, Australia, China, Patent analytics

China to Cancel Patent Subsidies, and Emphasise Quality Over Quantity

As highlighted in a report recently published by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), entitled Trademarks and Patents in China: The Impact of Non-Market Factors on Filing Trends and IP Systems, the high rate of Chinese patent and trademark filings in recent years is widely believed to have been influenced by government subsidies and other ‘non-market factors’.  Since at least 2011, some Chinese applicants appear to have been taking advantage of the Australian innovation patent system to maximise the subsidies they are able to claim for foreign patent grants.  In 2020, Chinese residents were by far the largest users of the system, filing more innovation patent applications than all other nationalities combined.

But could it be that the days of government subsidies, and an associated massive growth in patent applications originating in China, are drawing to a close?

On 27 January 2021, the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) announced, in a notification entitled ‘Notice of the CNIPA on Further Strictly Regulating Patent Application Behaviour’ (in Chinese) (‘Notice’), that many lucrative subsidies must end by the middle of this year, with all others to be phased out by 2025.  (A brief report of the Notice can be found on the China IP Law Update blog, while a Google translation of the Chinese original is quite comprehensible.)

The Notice states that the overriding objective of the new regulations on patent application behaviour is:

In order to thoroughly study and implement Xi Jinping’s thoughts on socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era; to earnestly implement the decisions and deployments of the Party Central Committee and the State Council; and to earnestly promote China’s transformation from a major importer of intellectual property rights to a major country of IP creation, and from the pursuit of quantity to the improvement of quality.

 Read full article ► 

Tags: China, Innovation policy, Patent filing

Chinese Mobile Tech Company OPPO Comes from Nowhere to Top Australian Patent Filing Table for 2019

Last calendar year, the number of standard patent filings in Australia fell by 1%, from 29,957 in 2018 to 29,666 in 2019.  While this represents only a small decline, it follows two years of growth, by 1.8% for 2016-2017 and 3.6% for 2017-2018, and thus represents a reversal of the recent upwards trend.  While international data on 2019 patent filings is not yet available, I think it doubtful that when IP Australia releases the 2020 edition of its annual Australian IP Report later this year it will be able to claim a high ranking for Australia among the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in terms of patent growth, as it did in last year’s report.  The 2019 result reflects a decline in both direct filings, and filings resulting from national phase entry of international applications previously filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT).

Demand for Australia’s second-tier patent right, the innovation patent, also fell in 2019, with 1702 applications for innovation patents being filed, compared with 2121 in 2018.  Legislation to phase out the innovation patent system passed in the Senate late last year, and now merely awaits the formality of passage through the House of Representatives before becoming law, although it seems unlikely that the decline in filings is in any way related.

Provisional filings – mostly by Australian residents – remained steady, with 4,947 provisional applications filed in 2019, compared with 4,943 in 2018.  This is mildly positive news, following as it does a fall of 5.2% between 2017 and 2018. 

It is also encouraging to see that self-filing of new patent applications declined yet again in 2019.  The number of originating applications (i.e. those that claim no earlier priority date, and are thus in most cases freshly-drafted) filed without the assistance of a patent attorney or other agent dropped to 1,702 from 1,870 in 2018.  This is now less than half of the nearly 3,500 originating applications that were self-filed each year between 2002 and 2007.  I regard this as a positive trend because the available data establishes, beyond any doubt, that outcomes for self-represented applicants are consistently far inferior to those of applicants that engage professional assistance.

As in previous years, the list of top applicants for Australian standard patents is dominated by foreign companies, with Aristocrat Technologies once again the only Australian company to appear in the top 30.  Aristocrat fell two places, to number four in the rankings, despite filing 238 standard patent applications (only just shy of the 252 it filed in 2018), and a significant decline in filings (from 314 to 244) by last year’s top applicant, Qualcomm, which now stands third.  LG Electronics was a big mover, increasing its filings from 175 to 245 to grab second spot.

The big surprise in the rankings is first-time entrant Guangdong OPPO Mobile Telecommunications Ltd (‘OPPO’), which leapt straight to number one with 314 standard patent applications.  OPPO had never filed more than 19 Australian applications in any previous year (that was in 2017), and had filed a grand total of just 47 applications up until the end of 2018.

Among Australian residents, universities and public research institutions once again feature prominently, taking half of the top 20 places in the local rankings of standard patent applicants, and 12 of the top 20 in the provisional filing chart.

For all the numbers, and further commentary, please read on.

 Read full article ► 

Tags: Australia, China, Patent analytics

Chinese Applicants Are Bypassing Local Patent Attorneys to Obtain Australian Standard Patents

According to IP Australia records, somewhere in this unprepossessing block of apartments in suburban Canberra is the Australian ‘office’ of not one, but at least 47 Chinese companies, which collectively filed 164 standard patent applications between the beginning of January and the end of April, 2019 (link to Google Sheet with full listing).  In each case, it further appears that expedited examination of the application was requested at filing.  A number of the applications have already been accepted.  In some cases, examination reports have been issued, and responses filed.  These have generally been of high quality and, but for formalities in a couple of instances, have resulted in acceptance of the applications concerned.  In no case, however, has any registered trans-Tasman patent attorney been involved.  Purportedly, each response letter has been signed by an inventor on behalf of the applicant company, i.e. presumably their employer.  The actual occupant of the Canberra address is a mystery – unnamed on any application, and seemingly uninvolved other than to assist the applicants in meeting the requirement, under regulation 22.10 of the Patents Regulations 1991 to provide an ‘address for service’ in Australia or New Zealand.

Unusual Australian patent filing behaviour by Chinese companies is nothing new.  I first wrote about the phenomenon of Chinese companies obtaining relatively large numbers of Australian innovation patents back in February 2013, a practice that – notwithstanding some limited efforts by the Patent Office to curb abuse of the system – continues largely unabated to this day.  I recently estimated that around a quarter of all innovation patent applications filed in 2018 were made by Chinese applicants (upon further analysis, I would probably now revise that number upwards, closer to one third).  It is widely believed that this behaviour is motivated by direct financial incentives provided by Chinese authorities to companies that obtain foreign patents.  In this context, the Australian innovation patent has the advantages of being cheap to apply for, fast to issue, and providing an official ‘patent certificate’ upon grant that can, presumably, be used for the purposes of claiming the Chinese government hand-outs.

These latest applications are something different, however.  First and foremost, they are for standard patents, for which no certificate will issue until and unless the applications pass substantive examination (and the opposition period).  They all claim priority from earlier Chinese national patent applications which were, in most cases, filed only shortly before the corresponding Australian applications (and certainly well within the 12-month period allowed under the Paris Convention).  And, as I have already noted, it appears that expedited examination has been requested in each case, with the applicants having a genuine intention of securing a granted Australian patent, even where objections have been raised by the examiner.

In short, these Chinese applicants are not looking merely to obtain an official patent certificate by any means available, at the lowest possible cost.  Rather, they are seeking enforceable patent rights, and in doing so they are willing to incur the additional costs of examination fees, acceptance fees, and dealing with any examination objections that may arise.

Even so, these companies do not appear to be willing to incur the costs associated with engaging Australian patent attorneys to assist them in applying for or obtaining patents.  This naturally raises the question of whether this is a problem for the applicants, for the occupant of that Canberra apartment, or for anybody else who might be involved in these filings?

 Read full article ► 

Tags: China, Patent attorney profession, Patent filing, Patents and society, Public policy

How IP Australia Has Been Quietly Curbing Abuse of the Innovation Patent System

Update, 16 May 2017: The Commissioner of Patents, Fatima Beattie, has responded to this article in the comments.

While working with the new 2017 release of the Intellectual Property Government Open Data (IPGOD) I noticed something unusual – in October 2016, IP Australia refused 101 innovation patent applications.  Adding to the mystery, in 53 of these cases the refusal was retrospective, in the sense that innovation patents had already been granted, in one case as far back as April 2015.  Not only is refusal something that can only happen to a pending application (a granted patent can, however, be revoked), but it is something that generally does not happen to an application for an innovation patent.  As at the time of this writing, there are 23,387 innovation patent records in IP Australia’s AusPat system.  Never before, nor (as yet) since, these 101 cases has an innovation patent application been refused.

The one thing that all 101 of these applications have in common is that they name a Chinese resident company or individual as applicant.  I have written on a number of previous occasions about suspected abuse of the Australian innovation patent system by Chinese applicants (see Junk Patents Dumped on Australia as Chinese Subsidies Rorted, Chinese Junk Patents Revisited: 2013 Filings Update and, most recently, Users and Abusers of the Australian Innovation Patent System).  IP Australia’s Australian Intellectual Property Report 2017 (‘IP Report’) observed that:
 

Although Australian residents remain the main users of the innovation patent system, for the first time since its inception, non-residents made up the majority of innovation patent applicants with 54 per cent of the total in 2016.
 
The increase in international applications is attributable almost exclusively to an increase of some 142 per cent in applications from Chinese residents to 871 applications. This accounts for around 93 per cent of the overall increase in non-resident applications, and represents 38 per cent of total filings.

It is my belief that the primary motivation for Chinese applicants to obtain Australian innovation patents is to secure government subsidies that are paid upon the grant of foreign patent rights.  An innovation patent is granted following a check only of certain formalities, and without substantive examination as to novelty and inventive step (or, rather, the lower standard of innovative step).  Although the resulting patent must pass examination and be certified before it can be enforced, the applicant nonetheless receives a certificate that conveys (at least to anybody who is insufficiently familiar with the workings of the Australian innovation patent system) the impression of a full patent grant .

It is clearly undesirable, to say the least, for the Australian Register of Patents to be cluttered with dubious registrations, and for these Chinese ‘junk’ patents to cloud our ability to assess how effectively the innovation patent system is serving the small-to-medium Australian enterprises for which it was primarily designed.  I therefore welcome any legitimate steps that may be taken to curb this activity.  However, the statutory basis for these ‘refusals’ is not clear to me.  It may be that the Commissioner of Patents is stepping outside the bounds of the Patents Act 1990.  If so, then it would not be the first time!

 Read full article ► 

Tags: Australia, China, Innovation patent, Patent Office, Public policy

Chinese Junk Patents Revisited: 2013 Filings Update

Companies in China are continuing to apply for Australian innovation patents – which are not subject to substantive examination before being granted – in order to take advantage of generous subsidies offered by the Chinese government to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) for obtaining foreign patents. 

I previously wrote about this phenomenon last February, after it came to my attention that an unusually large number of innovation patent applications had been filed by Chinese companies in 2012, via a number of agents who appeared to conduct no other Australian patent filing or prosecution work.  I far as I have been able to ascertain, none of these agents employ (or are) registered Australian patent attorneys.  It is unclear whether they have other relevant legal qualifications which would enable them to provide patent filing or acquisition services under the Australian law.

I thought it would be worthwhile to investigate innovation patent filings by Chinese companies in 2013, to see whether the practice was continuing.  I have found that it is, although at a reduced level of activity.  I have identified 110 innovation patent applications filed on behalf of Chinese companies during 2013 which appear most likely to have been obtained primarily in order to receive the government payment, rather than because of any genuine interest in obtain valid, enforceable Australian patent rights.

Some of the agents responsible for ‘Chinese junk patent’ filings in 2012 and earlier are continuing to do so, while others appear to have ceased (or, possibly, may be continuing to operate under other names).

Additionally, I have recently received reports confirming my belief that the purpose of Chinese companies in obtaining innovation patents is to claim financial benefits from the government, and not because of any genuine business interests in Australia.

 Read full article ► 

Tags: China, Innovation patent, Innovation policy, Patent attorney profession, Patent filing, Patents and society, Public policy

Junk Patents Dumped on Australia as Chinese Subsidies Rorted

A Chinese government scheme providing financial incentives for small and medium sized enterprises, public institutions or scientific research institutions appears to be resulting in abuse of the Australian patent system, and the 'dumping' of numerous low-quality innovation patents on the Australian Register.

These ‘junk’ patents are not being examined or certified.  They therefore represent no more than potential enforceable rights.  Even so, they generate costs to companies operating legitimately in Australia, which may need to obtain advice on the likely scope and validity of these patents in order to avoid possible infringement.  In extreme cases, the existence of junk patents could result in an Australian business choosing not to take the risk of bringing a new product to market, even though the Chinese owner of a patent is not itself offering any products or services in this country.

The new Chinese patent filings, which increased significantly in number after introduction of the Chinese government ‘Measures for the Administration of Special Funds for Subsidizing Foreign Patent Applications’ in April last year, appear mainly to be handled by Australian ‘agents’ who are neither Australian, nor persons authorised under the Australian Patents Act 1990 to apply for or obtain patents on behalf of other parties.

A number of these agents have been operating in Australia for some time, although with the commencement of the Chinese subsidy scheme, business looks to be booming!  One particularly enterprising operator appears to have established two credible-looking business fronts, and has commenced development of a new, and highly professional-looking, web site for one of those businesses.

This phenomenon is already resulting in distortions of Australian patent filing and grant statistics.  I recently reported on the top Australian patent recipients of 2012, and noted that, for the first time, a Chinese company appeared in the top 10.  It turns out that every one of the 97 patents granted to Hengdian Group Linix Motor Co last year is an innovation patent filed by a single dubious agency.

 Read full article ► 

Tags: China, Innovation policy, Patent attorney profession, Patent filing, Patents and society

Microsoft Tops Australian Patent Grants for 2010

‘Tis the season for statistics, as everybody looks back on the year that was 2010!

As we previously briefly reported, patent research company IFI CLAIMS Patent Services recently released its annual list of top US patent recipients for 2010.  Notably, companies in the information and communications technologies (ITC) sector dominated the list, which was headed by IBM with an astonishing, and record-breaking, 5896 US patents issued in 2010. IBM has now topped the US patent charts for 18 consecutive years.

This got us to wondering – how would the corresponding statistics for Australian patent grants compare?

 Read full article ► 

Tags: Australia, China, News, PCT, Statistics, US