Five more mandamus petitions challenging IPR institution denials. Five more denials. In a series of nonprecedential orders issued between February 24 and 27, 2026, the Federal Circuit rejected every theory that petitioners offered for why the USPTO's discretionary denial of inter partes review should be subject to judicial oversight. The petitioners included major technology companies (Intel, Tesla), a Chinese communications firm (Kangxi Communication Technologies), an education technology company (Kahoot!), and a startup founded by the very inventors of the patents it sought to challenge (Tessell). Each presented a different factual scenario and a different legal theory. None succeeded. In re Kangxi Communication Technologies (Shanghai) Co., Ltd., No. 2026-115 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 24, 2026); In re Intel Corp., No. 2026-113 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 24, 2026); In re Tessell, Inc., No. 2026-117 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 24, 2026); In re Kahoot! AS, No. 2026-119 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 25, 2026); In re Tesla, Inc., No. 2026-116 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 27, 2026).
Every patent application eventually resolves into one of two outcomes: it issues as a patent or it is abandoned. I have been tracking those outcomes (along with those applications "still pending") for every published utility application filed at the USPTO over the past two decades - and see some striking patterns. The patent allowance rate, measured as the percentage of resolved applications that issued as patents, traces a deep V-curve across two decades. Applications filed in 2001 had an allowance rate of about 71%. That figure dropped steadily to a trough of 59% for applications filed in May 2006. It then reversed course and climbed, year after year, through 67% in 2010, 74% in 2015, and up to 82% for those filed in early 2020. That is a 23-percentage-point swing from trough to peak.
The first chart below plots the allowance rate by filing month for all published U.S. utility patent applications filed between January 2001 and July 2024. The allowance rate is calculated as the number of applications that issued as patents divided by the number that have been resolved (issued plus abandoned), excluding applications that remain pending. For cohorts filed before late 2021, fewer than 10% of applications remain pending, making the data highly reliable. For more recent filing months, the dashed line reflects preliminary data that will almost certainly shift (downward) as the remaining applications resolve.
A USPTO patent examiner has agreed to pay $500,000 to resolve allegations that she examined patent applications from companies in which she held substantial stock positions. The settlement, announced by the Department of Justice on February 25, 2026, resolves allegations against Daxin Wu, who allegedly worked on at least nine patent applications submitted by companies in which she held financial interests between January 2019 and May 2022. The dollar amounts are striking. Wu allegedly reviewed applications for companies in which she owned more than $300,000 and $140,000 worth of stock, respectively. She also allegedly reviewed applications from commercial competitors of a company in which she held more than $900,000 in stock. These holdings dwarf the regulatory de minimis thresholds that permit patent examiners to hold limited stock positions in companies whose applications they review. Under 5 C.F.R. § 2640.202, an examiner may hold up to $15,000 in stock in a single company whose application they are reviewing, or up to $25,000 in aggregate across companies within the industry sector covered by their art unit. Wu's alleged holdings exceeded these thresholds by orders of magnitude.
The Wu case did not emerge from a vacuum. Two years ago, the Commerce Department's Office of Inspector General issued a report concluding that the USPTO and the Department of Commerce "did not effectively administer the Department's ethics program to protect against potential conflicts of interest by patent examiners." U.S. Dep't of Commerce, Office of Inspector General, The Department Needs to Strengthen Its Ethics Oversight for USPTO Patent Examiners, Final Report No. OIG-24-013-I (Feb. 14, 2024). That report, triggered by hotline referrals, found systemic failures at every level of the ethics oversight process. The OIG sampled 73 examiners and found that 26 had potential financial conflicts that ethics officials failed to identify. Projecting those results across the roughly 7,000 examiners required to file confidential financial disclosure reports, the OIG estimated that approximately 2,100 patent examiners (about 30%) had potential financial conflicts that went undetected in calendar year 2022.
The Wu settlement appears to be the first public enforcement action arising from those referrals. The OIG report noted that it "referred potential violations of law " to the Office of Investigations. The timeline aligns: Wu's alleged conduct covers 2019 through May 2022, and the hotline referrals began arriving in March 2022. The investigation then took roughly four years to produce yesterday's civil settlement.
During patent prosecution, an inventor wrote to his attorney in the margin of a draft declaration: "I am not sure it is a good idea to disclose this document." The district court called this "a rare example of direct evidence of an intent to defraud." A magistrate judge agreed. The patent was declared unenforceable for inequitable conduct on summary judgment. Case closed. Or so it seemed.
In baseball, there is a folk rule on force-outs that "tie goes to the runner." The idea is straightforward: if the ball and the runner arrive at the base simultaneously, the runner is safe. In fact, the Official Rules of Baseball do not admit that a tie is even possible, but rather the question is simply whether the fielder tagged the base before the runner arrived. But the folk rule persists because it reflects an instinct about how close calls should break: and in baseball it is the fielder's duty to force the out.
Director John Squires has brought a version of this thinking to patent examination. Since taking office in September 2025, Squires has repeatedly signaled that close calls on patent eligibility should favor the applicant. The December 4, 2025 memoranda on Subject Matter Eligibility Declarations (SMEDs) formalized the invitation: applicants facing Section 101 rejections should submit evidentiary declarations under 37 C.F.R. § 1.132, and examiners should treat that evidence seriously when evaluating eligibility under the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard. Dennis Crouch, Subject Matter Eligibility Declarations (SMEDs) to Overcome Eligibility Rejections, Patently-O (Dec. 5, 2025). The theory is that a well-drafted SMED, supported by concrete technical evidence, should create enough disputed facts to tip the balance in the applicant's favor. But the question remains whether examiners on the ground will agree.
After looking through several hundred R. 132 declarations, I eventually found seven SMEDs that specifically target Section 101 eligibility. The sample is small but instructive. These seven declarations span a range of technologies: data center infrastructure automation, financial analytics, robotic process automation, cybersecurity risk modeling, plant genomics, and blockchain systems. The declarants range from solo inventors with decades of software experience to PhD scientists at venture-backed startups. And the early results are mixed. So far, none have received a notice of allowance and others have been rejected (with the bulk still awaiting response from the examiner).
In Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute v. Amazon.com, Inc., No. 2024-1725 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 24, 2026), a panel led by Judge Dyk affirmed summary judgment invalidating U.S. Patent No. 7,177,798 as ineligible 35 U.S.C. § 101. The '798 patent claims a method for processing natural language inputs using case-based reasoning applied to a metadata database. Rensselaer and its exclusive licensee CF Dynamic Advances had asserted the patent against Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant technology. The district court (N.D.N.Y., Judge Sannes) granted Amazon's motion for summary judgment, finding the claims directed to patent-ineligible subject matter under Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int'l, 573 U.S. 208 (2014). The nonprecedential opinion applies the rule from Recentive Analytics, Inc. v. Fox Corp., 134 F.4th 1205 (Fed. Cir. 2025) (cert. denied) that applying a well-established AI technique to a new field does not overcome patent ineligibility. Judge Dyk authored both opinions.
At $3.2 million per dose, Elevidys is one of the most expensive drugs ever approved. The drug is used to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a fatal genetic disease that progressively destroys muscle function and kills most patients in their twenties. Elevidys represents both the remarkable promise and the profound access tension at the heart of gene therapy patents. The underlying technology was developed in the laboratory of Dr. James M. Wilson at the University of Pennsylvania, supported in substantial part by more than $105 million in NIH funding over Wilson's career, and then exclusively licensed to REGENXBIO Inc., which sued Sarepta for using the platform technology without authorization.
On February 20, 2026, the Federal Circuit reversed a Delaware district court's grant of summary judgment of ineligibility under 35 U.S.C. § 101, holding that the claimed genetically engineered host cells are not directed to a natural phenomenon. REGENXBIO Inc. v. Sarepta Therapeutics, Inc., No. 24-1408 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 20, 2026) (Stoll, J., joined by Dyk and Hughes). The reversal applies settled doctrine that traces Diamond v. Chakrabarty through Myriad's cDNA holding and Diamond v. Diehr's prohibition on dissecting claims into old and new elements. At the same time, the result here stands in sharp contrast to the § 101 struggles that have plagued software and diagnostic method claims over the past decade, where courts have routinely found "man made" items ineligible.
The patent at issue, US10526617, is owned by the University of Pennsylvania and exclusively licensed to REGENXBIO. The '617 patent expired in 2022, so this litigation was always about past damages, not injunctive relief. Representative claim 1 covers a cultured host cell containing a recombinant nucleic acid molecule encoding an AVV capsid protein having a sequence 95% identical to that listed. The molecule also includes a heterologous non-AAV sequence."
The key term "heterologous" means derived from a different species. "Recombinant" means the molecule is created by chemically splicing together nucleic acid sequences from two separate biological sources. Thus, the claimed cells do not themselves occur in nature -- but Judge Andrews still found the claims directed to a natural phenomenon. REGENXBIO Inc. v. Sarepta Therapeutics, Inc., No. 20-cv-1226-RGA (D. Del. Jan. 5, 2024).
The very first provision of the Copyright Act is a curious definition:
An “anonymous work” is a work on the copies or phonorecords of which no natural person is identified as author.
17 U.S.C. § 101. If Congress assumed every author must be a natural person, why would it need to define a category of works where no natural person is identified? That textual puzzle sits at the heart of Stephen Thaler's newly filed reply brief in Thaler v. Perlmutter, No. 25-449, which asks the Supreme Court to take up whether AI-generated works can receive copyright protection. The case has been distributed for the Court's February 27, 2026, conference.
SCOTUSGate: Supreme Court Petition Tracker
I have created a new website: SCOTUSGate (scotusgate.com), a tool for tracking petitions for certiorari at the Supreme Court. The site aggregates docket entries, briefing schedules, conference dates, and amicus filings for pending petitions. Cases can be browsed by topic, court of origin, or conference date. The Thaler case page is at scotusgate.com/case.php?number=25-449.
The site also tracks cases flagged for response, relisted petitions, and CVSG orders, which are often early signals of the Court's interest in a case. SCOTUSGate is really at an Alpha stage - a work in progress - and I welcome feedback. -Dennis
For the past year, the Federal Circuit has been systematically tightening the screws on patent damages and particularly pro-patentee expert testimony on the issue. Beginning with EcoFactor, Inc. v. Google LLC, 137 F.4th 1333 (Fed. Cir. 2025), the court vacated a $20 million reasonable royalty award for insufficient apportionment. Then came Jiaxing Super Lighting Electric Appliance Co. v. CH Lighting Technology Co., 146 F.4th 1098 (Fed. Cir. 2025), where the court vacated another award and suggested (in dicta) that experts must quantify their Georgia-Pacific adjustments. LabCorp v. Qiagen reversed a jury verdict on similar grounds. Coda Development v. Goodyear Tire "deflated" a $64 million award for inadequate apportionment. See Dennis Crouch, The Remedies Remedy is Almost Complete: EcoFactor v. Google, Patently-O (May 22, 2025); Dennis Crouch, Federal Circuit Extends EcoFactor Framework to Patent Damages Apportionment in Jiaxing Decision, Patently-O (Aug. 1, 2025); Dennis Crouch, Verdict Deflated: Fed Circuit Punctures Coda's $64M Win Over Goodyear, Patently-O (Dec. 8, 2025). The cumulative message to patentees seemed pretty clear: jury verdicts on damages face appellate scrutiny, and experts who failed to satisfy the court's increasing expectations would have their testimony excluded and the resulting awards overturned.
Today's decision in Willis Electric Co., Ltd. v. Polygroup Ltd., No. 2024-2118 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 17, 2026), suggests there is a limit. Writing for a unanimous panel, Chief Judge Moore affirmed a jury's $40+ million reasonable royalty award on a single dependent claim covering coaxial barrel connectors used in pre-lit artificial Christmas trees. The opinion runs to 37 pages, with the bulk devoted to a comprehensive defense of the damages verdict under Rule 702 and Daubert. The court upheld every challenged aspect of the patentee's expert testimony: her income-based apportionment, her market-based apportionment using comparable licenses, and her qualitative application of the Georgia-Pacific factors. Where EcoFactor drew a line against expert testimony predicated on inaccurate factual premises, Willis Electric draws a line in the other direction. It holds that methodological choices about how to model profitability, which licenses to consider comparable, and how to weigh qualitative factors are matters for cross-examination and jury deliberation, not judicial exclusion. The repeated refrain of the opinion is that reasonable royalty calculations "necessarily involve an element of approximation and uncertainty," EcoFactor, 137 F.4th at 1340, and Rule 702 must accommodate that reality.
For many years, I have seen the reasonable royalty "calculation" as a form of speculative science fiction. It is filled with such uncertainty that attempts for mathematical precision simply mask what is fundamentally a rough estimation exercise. The hypothetical negotiation is a legal fiction built on counterfactual assumptions, and the Georgia-Pacific factors provide structure without providing answers. Courts and experts have long struggled with how much rigor to demand from an inherently imprecise inquiry.
In Willis Electric, Chief Judge Moore engages with that tension directly, and several passages seem destined for heavy citation in future damages disputes. The court's core distinction is between (1) an expert who builds on erroneous factual premises -- ones that are "contrary to a critical fact upon which the expert relied" (the EcoFactor problem, warranting exclusion) and (2) an expert whose methodological choices reflect a "fact [dispute] over which reasonable minds can differ" (the Willis Electric situation, left to the jury). The opinion also deploys EcoFactor's own language about "approximation and uncertainty" as a shield rather than a sword, embedding it within a historical survey of reasonable royalty doctrine stretching back to Dowagiac Manufacturing Co. v. Minnesota Moline Plow Co., 235 U.S. 641 (1915), and even a 1960 Columbia Law Review student note. Recovery in Patent Infringement Suits, 60 Colum. L. Rev. 840 (1960).
Oral argument at the Federal Circuit typically lasts 30 minutes. But the judges on the panel do not divide that time equally among themselves. I used a sample of 1000+ Federal Circuit oral arguments and found some big differences among the judges.
Chief Judge Kimberly Moore leads the court with a median speaking time of 4.51 minutes per argument. Judge Taranto follows closely at 4.31. At the other end of the spectrum, Judge Lourie speaks for a median of just 0.86 minutes, and the newest member, Judge Cunningham for 0.92 minutes. That is a fivefold difference between the most and least talkative members of the court.
In Apple v. Squires, the Federal Circuit has again reinforced the USPTO Director's broad and largely unchecked discretionary power at the IPR institution stage. Over the past several years, the court has systematically closed every door that petitioners have tried to open. Most recently, it denied a wave of mandamus petitions challenging Director Squires' discretionary denials, holding that 35 U.S.C. § 314(d) bars review of institution decisions even when petitioners raise constitutional and APA claims. In its 2023 decision in this very case, the court held that substantive challenges to the NHK-Fintiv framework were themselves unreviewable. Apple Inc. v. Vidal, 63 F.4th 1 (Fed. Cir. 2023). Now, in the new decision, the court closed the next (and potentially last remaining) opening: the claim that the NHK-Fintiv instructions should have been adopted through notice-and-comment rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act. Apple Inc. v. Squires, No. 2024-1864 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 13, 2026).
Writing for a panel that included Judges Lourie and Chen, Judge Taranto held that the NHK-Fintiv instructions are a "general statement of policy" exempt from APA rulemaking requirements under 5 U.S.C. § 553(b). The reasoning rests on a structural feature of post-Arthrex patent administration that carries consequences well beyond the Fintiv factors themselves: because the Director is the statutory holder of institution authority, and the PTAB acts only as a delegatee whose decisions the Director can always displace, instructions to the Board about how to exercise that delegated authority cannot "bind" the agency in the APA sense.
The decision seems to confirm that there is no procedural legal constraint, short of a major constitutional challenge, on the Director's power to restrict or shut down IPRs through internal policy pronouncements.
The Federal Circuit has affirmed an $84.9 million antitrust patent-misuse judgment against a patent owner who conditioned licenses on exclusive purchase of unpatented products, finding that the products were "staple goods" with substantial non-infringing uses and therefore outside the Congressionally created safe harbor 35 U.S.C. § 271(d). Ingevity Corp. v. BASF Corp., No. 2024-1577 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 11, 2026) (Lourie, J.). Tying cases have used to be much more common in patent litigation, but largely went dormant after the Supreme Court's decision in Illinois Tool Works Inc. v. Independent Ink, Inc., 547 U.S. 28 (2006), which eliminated the presumption that patents confer market power.
In this essay, I look at the particular dispute between Ingevity and BASF and also the historic trajectory of this sort of antitrust liability for improper extension of patent rights.
When I see a computer-related patent with a pre-2010 filing date, my first instinct is to check for eligibility problems. Patents drafted before the Supreme Court's 2014 decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, 573 U.S. 208 (2014), were written in a different era of patent law where Section 101 was often an absent watchman even for software and business method claims. Specifications from that period routinely described the problem being solved in business terms and the solution in generic technological ones. This made sense under the legal regime that existed at the time. But times have changed and the same specifications now must support claims that need to demonstrate a concrete technical improvement - and that can be a very hard task when the underlying disclosure treats computer components as interchangeable commodities.
Two decisions from the Federal Circuit this past week illustrate the problem. In the precedential GoTV Streaming, LLC v. Netflix, Inc., No. 2024-1669 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 9, 2026), Judge Taranto reversed an jury infringement verdict and held three related patents invalid under Section 101. The patents, with a 2007 priority date, claim methods for tailoring content display specifications to the capabilities of a wireless device. In the nonprecedential Innovaport LLC v. Target Corporation, No. 2024-1545 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 6, 2026), the court affirmed summary judgment invalidating all 55 asserted claims across six related patents claiming priority back to a 1999 application. Those patents cover systems for providing in-store product location information.
Some of the asserted patents were prosecuted after Alice and overcame eligibility rejections during examination. The Federal Circuit found that fact irrelevant, citing its prior holding that courts "are not required to defer to Patent Office determinations as to eligibility." But, in my review, neither prosecution history developed a factual record supporting inventive concept at Alice step two. A more robust prosecution history, one that built up specific factual showings rather than simply amending around the examiner's rejection, might have given the courts something to work with.
When a university scientist invents something valuable, a familiar sequence follows. The inventor assigns rights to the university as a condition of employment. The university licenses the patent to a corporate partner while the inventor retains a royalty interest. If infringement litigation erupts, the inventor watches from the sidelines while lawyers representing the university and its licensee make decisions that will determine the value of that royalty stream. The inventor's interests often align with the university - but certainly not always.
A new cert petition filed by Dr. Monib Zirvi highlights this structural problem. Zirvi v. Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, LLP, No. 25-940 (petition filed February 2026). Zirvi, a Cornell-trained scientist who co-invented "ZipCode" DNA sequencing technology, claims that the law firms controlling patent infringement litigation on behalf of Cornell University and its exclusive licensee Thermo Fisher Scientific told him that his interests were "aligned" with theirs and that they "represented his interests." He spent hundreds of hours preparing confidential technical analysis at the lawyers' request. But when the case settled, he had no seat at the negotiating table.
Zirvi later sued the lawyers for malpractice, but ultimately received a one-two civil procedure punch.
When Alexander Graham Bell filed his patent application on February 14, 1876, he titled it "Improvement in Telegraphy." Not "Telephone." Not "Apparatus for Transmitting Speech by Electricity." Just a modest tweak to the existing telegraph art. The United States government later alleged this was no accident. In United States v. American Bell Telephone Co., 128 U.S. 315 (1888), the government's bill of complaint charged that Bell "purposely framed his said application and claim in ambiguous and general terms" and "did not set forth or declare that his alleged invention had any relation to the art of transmitting articulate speech by means of electricity." The strategy worked, at least initially: the Patent Office examiner "did not understand the application to lay claim to the art of transmitting speech" and so "did not make an inquiry as to the state of that art or the patents or the printed publications concerning it." No search for the work of Reis, Meucci, or even the caveat filed that same day by Elisha Gray. Bell got his patent on March 7, 1876, three weeks after filing. The case raised serious fraud allegations that the Supreme Court addressed in a companion case, The Telephone Cases, 126 U.S. 1 (1888), but the patent survived.
Nearly 150 years later, patent attorneys are still doing the same thing, though the tools are better and the practice now has a name: targeted drafting. The basic idea is to frame an application so the USPTO routes it to a favorable art unit, where the examiner corps is more likely to allow claims. The mechanism is different from Bell's era, but the impulse is identical. A good negotiator picks a willing counterpart. A good patent prosecutor picks an art unit where the odds favor allowance. Analytics vendors have for years been marketing tools to predict art unit assignment and suggesting language changes to steer applications toward friendlier examiners.
The War Industry (formerly Defense) heavily invests in new technology and patents. But, we see very few patent infringement lawsuits. A key reason is 28 U.S.C. § 1498. That statute channels patent infringement claims involving government-authorized work away from private defendants and into the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, with the United States as the sole defendant (and a reasonable royalty as the only remedy). For government contractors and subcontractors, § 1498 operates as a powerful shield: if the infringing activity was performed "for the Government" and "with the authorization or consent of the Government," the patent holder's only remedy is a compensation action against the United States. The contractor walks free. This design reflects a deliberate policy choice. The government pays heavily for technology development with taxpayer dollars and, in exchange, retains control as the key point person - and it allows the administration to resolve patent disputes as it sees fit.
In Arlton v. AeroVironment, Inc., No. 2021-2049 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 2026) (nonprecedential), the Federal Circuit affirmed summary judgment shielding AeroVironment from patent infringement liability under § 1498 for its work developing NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter and a terrestrial copy called "Terry." The Arltons — co-inventors and co-owners of U.S. Patent No. 8,042,763, covering a counter-rotating coaxial rotor UAV — had developed the underlying technology under Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts with the military. When the government declined to award them follow-on work and instead contracted with AeroVironment through JPL and NASA, the Arltons sued AeroVironment for infringement.
Last month I examined the challenges of single-reference obviousness rejections, where examiners attempt to show that a claimed invention would have been obvious based on just one prior art document. The opposite problem deserves equal attention: obviousness rejections that pile on reference after reference, sometimes combining five, seven, or even a dozen separate documents to reconstruct the claimed invention. In a thoughtful new working paper, patent attorney John Goodhue argues that the Federal Circuit should reconsider In re Gorman, 933 F.2d 982 (Fed. Cir. 1991), which held that "the criterion is not the number of references, but what they would have meant to a person of ordinary skill in the field." John Goodhue, Rethinking In Re Gorman: Why the Number of References Does Matter in Obviousness Determinations Under 35 U.S.C. § 103 (Working Paper, 2026). Goodhue's diagnosis: when an examiner assembles numerous disparate references to arrive at a claimed invention, this strongly suggests hindsight reconstruction rather than forward-looking obviousness analysis.
Goodhue proposes a tiered presumption framework keyed to reference count. Under his approach, one to two references would trigger no presumption; three references would create a weak presumption against obviousness; four to five references would create a moderate presumption; and six or more would create a strong presumption rebuttable only in exceptional circumstances. The presumption would yield to evidence that the references teach the same solution, that multi-reference synthesis is routine in the field, or that one reference explicitly directs combination with others. While I share Goodhue's concerns about kitchen-sink rejections, I suggest that creating numerical thresholds and novel presumptions is unnecessary. The existing doctrinal requirements of motivation to combine and reasonable expectation of success already contain the tools needed to police multi-reference combinations. When applied properly, these requirements simply become harder to satisfy as reference count increases. In my view, courts and the Patent Office should recognize this relationship rather than layering on new presumptions.
In January 2026, USPTO Director John Squires issued his first decision targeting a Chinese state-linked entity's inter partes review petition, and the result is both less dramatic and more revealing than the national-security framing might suggest. Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. v. Micron Technology, Inc., IPR2025-00098 & IPR2025-00099, Paper 38 (USPTO Jan. 15, 2026). The Director vacated the PTAB's decisions granting institution and denied YMTC's petitions challenging two Micron NAND flash memory patents (U.S. Patent Nos. 8,945,996 and 10,872,903). The decision is designated informative.
The case sits at the intersection focal points. The first is geopolitical. YMTC is a Chinese semiconductor manufacturer founded in 2016 by the partially state-owned Tsinghua Unigroup with approximately $24 billion in initial state-backed investment. The company was placed on the Bureau of Industry and Security's Entity List in December 2022 as an organization "reasonably believed to be involved, or to pose a significant risk of being or becoming involved, in activities contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States." 15 C.F.R. § 744.11. The Department of Defense separately designated YMTC as a "Chinese Military Company Operating in the United States" in January 2024. Against this backdrop, YMTC filed IPR petitions challenging two Micron NAND flash memory patents. After Micron sought Director Review, Dir. Squires issued a Show Cause order on November 10, 2025, requiring YMTC to justify why adjudicating its petitions was an appropriate use of the Office's limited resources given its Entity List designation. See Dennis Crouch, Shutting the Patent Office Door: YMTC and the Entity List, Patently-O (Nov. 16, 2025).
The second focal point is IPR process. Dir. Squires has been systematically tightening the IPR petition process, including the real-party-in-interest requirement. In September 2025, he de-designated SharkNinja Operating LLC v. iRobot Corp., IPR2020-00734, Paper 11 (PTAB Oct. 6, 2020), which had permitted PTAB judges to ignore RPI deficiencies in some instances. With SharkNinja gone, the statutory text of § 312(a)(2) returned to full force as an independent threshold requirement: a petition "may be considered" only if it identifies "all" real parties in interest. Failure to disclose means the petition is simply not in condition for consideration.
