Big Tech's Ten Most Interesting Patents This Week (8/1/2026) | Patentlyze

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Deep dive · Aug 1, 2026

Big Tech’s Ten Most Interesting Patents This Week (8/1/2026)

Big Tech's 10 most interesting patents this week, in plain English: OpenAI's chip design, Samsung's spoiler-blurring TV, Disney's crystal projections, Waymo's memory for blind corners, and more.

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A weekly read of what the world’s biggest technology companies just told the U.S. patent office.

Every Thursday, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office publishes a fresh batch of patent applications. Most of them are routine: defensive filings, small tweaks to existing IP, paperwork nobody outside an examiner’s office will ever open.

But a patent is one of the more honest documents a big company produces, and one of the earliest. Companies file claims two to four years before products ship, sometimes before a project even has a name. By the time something turns up in a keynote, the patent behind it has often been public for a year or more.

This week’s drop included more than 600 new applications across the 17 companies we cover at Patentlyze. We wrote up 224 of them. These ten stood out.

1. OpenAI is designing chips now, and this one refuses to waste a move

OpenAI files so few patents that any new application from them is worth reading, and this one is about silicon, not software: OpenAI’s patent for a chip that runs AI math forward and backward without moving the data.

Nearly everything a model does comes down to multiplying matrices, and training requires running those multiplications in two orientations, normal and transposed. Today’s hardware handles that by physically shuffling the numbers around, which costs more time and energy than the math itself. OpenAI’s filing describes a unit that performs both orientations on the same stored weights, so nothing ever has to move.

The invention is clever, but the applicant is the story. A company that buys GPUs by the hundreds of thousands is filing patents on the internals of AI hardware. That says something about how much of its future OpenAI intends to build itself.

2. Waymo’s cars share notes on where pedestrians hide

A driverless car approaching a blind corner cannot see what is behind it. Waymo’s answer is to make sure some other car already has: Waymo’s patent for teaching its fleet to expect hidden pedestrians at specific locations.

Every Waymo vehicle that passes a spot records what tends to appear there, people stepping out from behind a parked truck, cyclists emerging from an alley. The fleet pools those observations into a location-by-location memory, and each car adjusts its behavior at that corner before it can see anything at all.

Most occlusion systems choose between braking hard at every blind spot or assuming a generic phantom pedestrian everywhere. A learned, per-corner expectation is a third way, and our read gives this one a high chance of being granted. Every driverless mile quietly becomes a rehearsal for the next car through.

3. Samsung’s TV blurs the score before you see it

You recorded the game and you have made it to the fourth quarter unspoiled. Then you search for the broadcast and a thumbnail ruins everything. Samsung feels your pain: Samsung’s patent for a TV that automatically blurs spoilers in search results.

The filing describes a spoiler prevention mode built into the television itself. When you type a search, the TV first judges whether the query is the kind that surfaces outcomes, then screens the incoming results and hides the images and text likely to give something away before they reach the screen.

It is a small, human problem, which is exactly what makes it a good patent. Streaming turned every search box into a minefield of scores and plot reveals, and Samsung is proposing the shield live in the hardware where every app has to pass through it.

4. Google’s earbuds check your ears by sonar

Earbuds already guess whether they are in your ear with proximity sensors, and they guess wrong often enough to be annoying. Google wants to stop guessing: Google’s patent for earbuds that bounce sound off your eardrum to tell whether they are really in.

The technique, audioplethysmography, sends tiny inaudible signals into the ear canal and reads what comes back. The acoustics inside your ear change in distinctive ways when a bud is seated, loose, or being adjusted, so the earbud can tell not just worn versus not worn, but whether you are fiddling with the fit.

Google has already used this acoustic trick to read heart rate. Repurposing it for wear detection means fewer podcasts blaring from a nightstand, and it hints at earbuds that understand the state of your ear well enough to adjust themselves to it.

5. Apple wants your buttons to feel like jelly

Apple has spent years making glass feel like paper, rubber, and springs. The next...