alt Hacker NewsMistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”
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It is quite funny an EU company patenting a software feature that is basically unpatentable in EU in the US.
Clearly this is an attempt to prevent similar patents from being weaponised against them in the US.
No one cares about such stuff in Europe.
So anyone have prior art we can point to? Because no way is a rpc call novel.
Is “by an LLM” the new “on a computer” for lame patents?
Do software patents only exist for rich players to build a moat against poorer players? At this point with patents of this quality only reason for them to exist seems to be to cross-license them for extra revenue and to possibly block anyone too poor to fight for themselves...
Patent for the most basic pattern seen in literally all of software engineering
How does this make sense? It is public knowledge/pattern.
Given I wrote an article describing the same things years before they submitted the patent, could I not invalidate their patent with that?
How is the US patent registry easy to search ? I would be curious to see the patent registration of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc. One way or another, I do fully expect every of those companies to try to fill these kinds of "almost for sure invalid and overturnable" patent as a way to defend themselves from every other actor (the classic "Oh I infringed on your patent ? Well here are some of MY patent you are infringing on, so let's call it a day").
It should be embarrassing and shameful to apply for such a trivial patent.
Setting aside the tech, which looks like an asynchronous await across a network, the interesting question is why Mistral would patent this in the US.
Simple, because the patent is less about protecting an invention than doing business in the US.
The US is more hospitable to software patents than Europe. A US patent also gives Mistral something useful when dealing with companies that already hold large patent portfolios: defensive leverage, cross-licensing, and one more asset on the books to make it attractive to investors.
There's a certain absurdity to it, and the French have a history with absurd. A French open-weights company crosses the Atlantic to put a patent around a loop, not because the code is remarkable, but because the American market makes the loop a valuable asset, business-wise.
Cloudflare introduced Code Mode far earlier (https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/)
Can there be consequences for those who grant those patents? It seems the primary examiner Brian W Wathen also granted prior Art patents to Salesforce and NCR Voyix as well.
This is called CodeAct (https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01030) and is available in a number of frameworks.
Patent was applied for 04.03.2026. langgraph-codeact _shipped_ this capability in February.
The irony is that it's not probably not patentable in Europe.
I read somewhere that the US Patent Office is like a candy store for other countries to pick up cool tech and continue local development.
Can't beat them... litigate?
I do wonder if we need a charitable foundation that does software patents and makes them freely available just to stop cockroaches abusing patents.
Another step (although governance would need to be super good for this). Would be for this charity to withold access to these patents from companies that decide to abuse stupid patents.
w/e, plenty of prior art for this
Priority date of March 4 2026 and claims this patent is novel on that date, clearly trying it on. Hope it gets struck down.
Still pending, or am I mistaken? Can anyone with knowledge on the US process make an estimate how likely this is to go through? I know of Uniloc and their "efforts", is there a possibility that this could take a similarly damaging path?
The ironic part of it is, that to my own experience and benchmarks Mistral is by far the worst model from frontier labs at tool calling followed closely by Gemini.
TONS of prior art.
Cocorico !! Well played Mistral ! Really funny since software patents does not exist in France ...
Can somebody care to explain if the 2013 and 2006 refer to IDs or reference to past years.
But... why? Isn't that what smolagents[0] has done from the beginning? Also this move is blackening Mistral in my book.
Mistral has set off my stink test for a while now, they seem to be a "friendly EU AI provider" who are really an EU mouthpiece for regulation and stifling competition instead of actually innovating
Edit: downvote if you want, but here's another example: "Companies selling artificial intelligence models in Europe should pay a "levy" to support cultural industries, the head of French developer Mistral said on Friday, March 20." https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/03/20/m...
what an insane thing to have a patent for.
EU AI innovation is really amazing.
no shot my gpt-3 discord chatbot that did this beats it as prior art
Plenty of previous art.
I have prior art, there's a ton of prior art GitHub, good luck with that patent.
These don't really do anything, its just investement bait/participation trophies.
Once worked at a startup with a legendary dumbass who would tell anyone who listened about their patent for URL routing in javascript. Please don't hurt yourself rolling your eyes
Getting a patent on software is mid-brain mid-manager shit to pad marketing and inflate egos, doesn't really do anything.
I could copy this "design" exactly and it would be totally fair to use. Exhibit 270 is my favorite
Results in JSON format
If Apple lost the "Swipe" patent on a device they pioneered, your standard HTTP API is probably not that original.
that is just ipc
What's the use for this, you just tell your AI to build something that does the job without infringing the patent, make no mistakes.
AI companies business model is that peasants don’t have intellectual property. Everyone who contributed to this filing should be publicly spat upon and shunned.
If you are a software developer and you sell your time and IP for money to employers. I highly recommend not looking at patents if you don't want to reduce your market price by introducing the liability of patent infringement. Especially don't publicly comment about the patent, there's almost no upside.
The idea of patents is not to read a feed of the new ones and to discuss them as innovations, it's for the patent holders to use as proof in the future that they had already thought about a thing. The best strategy, in any case, is to publish your own patents, or to document your inventions privately or through your own public channels. Such that in the future IF you are sued for patent infringement, you can prove you didn't arrive at your IP by stealing theirs.
Obligatory: I Am Not A Lawyer
So without sandbox: it doesn't apply. Without explicit tool approval step: it doesn't apply. Response in xml: it doesn't apply.
What is the point?
I come up with at least two ideas like this every time I sit down in the toilet to poop.
This is just an RPC with JSON being passed around like a messaging system.
So we are just vibe patenting rubbish and rebranding it with AI?
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How is this patentable I have a piece of software doing exactly this for me in my dev setup :s
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Never liked the French..
I'd like to patent the term "disadvertisement" and use this as a prime example.
Having my name on a bunch of software patents - and, yes, I tried to get my name off them, but was not allowed - I can fairly confidently say: There is not A single worthy software patent out there. You know, one that is "not obvious to someone skilled in the art" and that actually protects a monetary investment.
Software patent are a scourge of the software industry. Patents are designed to protect costly research; simply having an idea is not costly (but it makes in medical research for example). All that software patents do is creating a minefield that hinders competition.
For software Copyright is a far better instrument. Let the one with best implementation win... That's where the cost is: Implementing, testing, shipping, maintaining. Protect that.
Sorry for the rant.
Edit: Spelling