HACKER Q&A
📣 shaheeniquebal

How are early-stage AI startups thinking about IP protection?


Hi HN,

I’m researching how early-stage AI and health-tech startups think about protecting their innovations.

Traditional patents are expensive, slow and often misaligned with how fast AI products evolve. I’m curious:

Are founders filing patents early? Are you relying on trade secrets? Publishing defensively? Not worrying about IP at all? Waiting until revenue?

We’re collecting responses through a short 60-second survey to better understand real-world behavior:

https://forms.gle/8UAytkGNfge4GKrH8

If you’d rather just comment here, that’s equally helpful.

I’m happy to share aggregated insights back with the community.

Thanks, Shaheen

  👤 nitin_flanker Accepted Answer ✓
It highly depends on the industry but in health-tech, startups still opt for patent protection, simply because it works. For anything that is not suitable for patents, many founders opt for trade secret (as patents are open to everyone and can be used by competition to figure out how you're doing what you're doing).

Another strategy that I have seen experienced founder following is keeping their patent under examination for longer. They either respond late to the examiner's questions, purposefully opt for GAUs (Group art units. Different GAU reviews different tech patents) where the prosecution timeline is slower. This gives founder extra time to keep their innovations hidden while still protected, until they are ready to enter market with viable products.

For AI based, software patents are a tricky game with many getting rejected under Alice 101 rejections. The drafting and prosecution methods also change a lot when dealing with software patents about AI.

I can share more in-detail if you have any specific question.

Context: I am not a founder but I work in a Patent and technology consultation company and we regularly help with prior art searching, patent monetization, and large scale patent analysis on industry.

I have talked to about 200 early stage founders last year through conferences or in-person interviews and talked specifically about this topic.