Annual patent applications related to AI per million people
What you should know about this indicator
- The data covers patents for AI-related inventions filed at patent offices around the world.
- Patents are counted by family — a group of documents that describe the same invention. Inventors often file the same invention in several countries, so this avoids double-counting.
- A family counts as a granted patent if any of its documents has been granted, and as an application if all are still pending.
- Each family is assigned to the country where it was first filed. If an invention is filed at the European Patent Office and then in China, it counts only towards the European Patent Office.
- The data shows where patents are filed, not where inventors are based. Filing location is a proxy for where inventors expect to develop, make, or sell their inventions.
- Patent data has a lag because some offices take years to publish new filings. Recent years are excluded here.
More Data on Artificial Intelligence
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
How we process data at Our World in Data
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
We divided the source's country-level figures by population to calculate per-million-people values.
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Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: Annual patent applications related to AI per million people”, part of the following publication: Charlie Giattino, Edouard Mathieu, Veronika Samborska, and Max Roser (2023) - “Artificial Intelligence”. Data adapted from Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Various sources. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260430-092147/grapher/artificial-intelligence-patents-submitted-per-million.html [online resource] (archived on April 30, 2026).How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
Center for Security and Emerging Technology (2026); Population based on various sources (2024) – with major processing by Our World in DataFull citation
Center for Security and Emerging Technology (2026); Population based on various sources (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Annual patent applications related to AI per million people – CSET” [dataset]. Center for Security and Emerging Technology, “Country Activity Tracker: Artificial Intelligence”; Various sources, “Population” [original data]. Retrieved April 30, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260430-092147/grapher/artificial-intelligence-patents-submitted-per-million.html (archived on April 30, 2026).Download
Quick download
Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.
Data API
Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.
Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/artificial-intelligence-patents-submitted-per-million.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseMetadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/artificial-intelligence-patents-submitted-per-million.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseExcel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/artificial-intelligence-patents-submitted-per-million.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests
# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/artificial-intelligence-patents-submitted-per-million.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})
# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/artificial-intelligence-patents-submitted-per-million.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()R
library(jsonlite)
# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/artificial-intelligence-patents-submitted-per-million.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/artificial-intelligence-patents-submitted-per-million.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/artificial-intelligence-patents-submitted-per-million.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear