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ARTICLE · 15 MARCH 2026

Natural Language Processing Patent Invalidated As Subject Matter Ineligible

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The Federal Circuit has issued a nonprecedential decision in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, CF Dynamic Advances LLC v. Amazon.com, Inc., relating to U.S. Patent No. 7,177,798 (the "798 patent")...

United StatesIntellectual Property
Justin Foster
Justin Foster

The Federal Circuit has issued a nonprecedential decision in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, CF Dynamic Advances LLC v. Amazon.com, Inc., relating to U.S. Patent No. 7,177,798 (the “798 patent”) to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and CF Dynamic Advances LLC (together “Rensselaer”). The court held that the ‘798 patent is invalid for being directed to ineligible subject matter. In particular, the court followed recent precedent that applying known artificial intelligence technology to a new field is not eligible for patent protection.

The ‘798 patent discloses a method for processing a natural language input provided by a user. It is directed to the application of case-based reasoning to a metadata database within natural language processing. Independent claim 1, which is representative of most of the claims, is shown below:

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