The two cases and the patents at issue
According to a report by IT之家, on November 12 Flinn Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technologies LLC filed two separate patent infringement actions before the District Court for the District of Delaware, naming Anthropic PBC and OpenAI OpCo as defendants, respectively. The proceedings are registered under numbers 1:26-cv-01454, against Anthropic, and 1:26-cv-01455, against OpenAI.
At the center of the dispute are five U.S. patents (US 12,223,404, US 12,327,166, US 12,462,197, US 12,462,198 and US 12,511,580), all titled for the training and iterative processing of attention-based neural networks. According to the source's account, which cites Law360, the patent applications were filed by Steven Flinn and Naomi Moneypenny between late 2015 and early 2016. Flinn AI argues that those inventions constitute the technical basis of features that are now central to generative artificial intelligence systems.
What is alleged against the two models
The case against Anthropic mainly concerns the large language models of the Claude family. In the plaintiff's argument, with the evolution and expansion of the models and related products, the functions of attention-based inference, information retrieval, memory, agents and multimodality are said to have become increasingly advanced and to continue to fall within the patent claims.
The allegations made against OpenAI are described as analogous: Flinn AI states that the progressive updating of the models and their related functionalities entails continuing infringement. The material does not specify which products or specific versions are indicated and does not quantify any damages sought.
The broader picture and open questions
The same article notes that, in parallel, a group of nonprofit organizations sued OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google and SpaceXAI in an attempt to curb the development of advanced models. This is, however, a separate initiative, for which no grounds, venue or outcomes are indicated. The source also recalls that Flinn founded ManyWorlds Inc., a company later joined by Moneypenny.
To be verified
The picture remains open on several fronts. The source does not report responses from Anthropic or OpenAI, does not clarify the validity status of the patents or whether the defendants have already filed defensive pleadings. It is not indicated whether the two cases will be consolidated, what remedies are sought beyond a finding of infringement, or what the procedural timeline is. It should also be specified that Flinn AI's statements are party statements contained in the filings, not judicial findings. A ruling unfavorable to the defendant companies could have effects on the contested functionalities, but at present no such consequence is supported by the available material.
