Flinn Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technologies LLC filed a patent-infringement complaint against Anthropic PBC in the US District Court for the District of Delaware on 12 November 2026. The court docket records a jury demand in case 1:26-cv-01454 and lists five patents in a report filed with the court. Flinn’s allegation puts Anthropic’s Claude model at the centre of a dispute over neural-network technology developed before the model existed.
Key points
- Flinn alleges that Anthropic infringes five patents issued to co-inventors Steven Flinn and Naomi Moneypenny.
- The applications date to late 2015 and early 2016; the complaint targets Claude and seeks monetary damages.
- The Delaware court has linked the Anthropic case to another action filed by Flinn. A summons to Anthropic was returned executed on 13 November.
Five patents and Flinn’s applications
Flinn, a company founded by computer scientist Steven Flinn, alleges that Anthropic infringes five patents issued to Flinn and Naomi Moneypenny as co-inventors, Bloomberg Law reported. The applications were filed in late 2015 and early 2016. In the complaints, Flinn describes them as covering attention-based neural-network technology used in modern generative AI systems, according to Bloomberg Law. That description is the plaintiff’s account of what its inventions cover, rather than a determination about Anthropic’s model.
The patent numbers recorded in the Delaware docket are US 12,327,166 B1, US 12,223,404 B2, US 12,511,580 B1, US 12,462,197 B1 and US 12,462,198 B1. They appear in a report to the Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks filed on 12 November alongside the complaint. The docket also records two sets of exhibits attached to the complaint. Those filings put five individual patents, rather than a general claim to attention-based computing, into the court action.
The Anthropic complaint names Claude, while a separate complaint against OpenAI names ChatGPT, Shattered reported. Flinn seeks monetary damages without naming an amount in the complaints. The applications predate the 2017 publication of the transformer architecture, a distinction that gives Flinn’s allegations their chronology but leaves the patent claims themselves to be tested against the products named in each suit.
Delaware links Flinn’s two cases
Flinn filed its complaints against Anthropic and OpenAI separately in Delaware on 12 November. The Anthropic case is numbered 1:26-cv-01454; the OpenAI case is numbered 1:26-cv-01455. A docket entry in the Anthropic action records that the clerk’s office asked counsel whether the two civil actions were related. Counsel’s office confirmed that they were, and the court established a relationship between the cases. Each complaint remains an allegation against the company and product it names.
The Anthropic docket classifies the action as patent infringement and records a jury demand by Flinn. It also lists a disclosure statement filed by Flinn under Rule 7.1, with no parent companies or affiliates listed. The clerk issued a summons to Anthropic on 12 November. These entries trace the start of the action: Flinn has asked a federal court to hear its infringement claim and a jury to decide it.
Anthropic summons returned on 13 November
The docket’s next entry is a summons returned executed, filed on 13 November at 2:29pm Eastern time. The court records it as document number 6 in Flinn Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technologies, LLC v. Anthropic, PBC.
