Patents

What patents MCP server does

The patents MCP server exposes US Patent and Trademark Office data through the USPTO Open Data Portal at data.uspto.gov. It covers granted US patents and published applications, with searches based on keywords, assignees, inventors, application numbers, or patent numbers.

Results can include titles, inventors, applicants, classifications, filing and grant information, application status, publication identifiers, and dates. The data also supports deeper investigation of an identified record: prosecution transactions, parent and child continuity relationships, and recorded assignment or conveyance history.

The corpus includes utility, design, plant, reissue, and reexamination records. There is no dedicated type filter, so clients must inspect the returned type field when they need to separate these categories.

How it works

Use search_patents for a broad keyword or date-bounded search. Use get_patent when you already have an application or granted patent identifier. Application numbers go in number; a granted patent number should be supplied as patent_number to avoid identifier collisions.

get_patent_transactions provides the prosecution timeline, while get_patent_continuity describes relationships such as continuations, divisionals, and provisional predecessors. Ownership research can use get_patent_assignments for a known application or search_patent_assignments to search by assignee, assignor, patent number, or application number.

The canonical citation pattern is pipeworx://uspto/patent/{number}. Results are cached for 24 hours. Clients needing same-day grant results can send Cache-Control: no-cache.

Setup and configuration

Standard access is free and does not require user authentication. The service uses a platform API key configured server-side. A caller that needs its own quota can provide _apiKey with a key obtained from https://data.uspto.gov/myodp.

The upstream source is the USPTO Open Data Portal, not the legacy PatentsView API, which was sunset on May 1, 2025. This integration is independent and unofficial.

Tools and capabilities

The patents MCP server supports these documented operations:

• search_patents for keyword, filing-date, and grant-date searches.
• get_patent for an individual application or patent record.
• get_patent_transactions for prosecution and transaction history.
• get_patent_continuity for parent and child application relationships.
• get_patent_assignments for assignments associated with an application.
• search_patent_assignments for ownership and conveyance searches.

Search responses can include assignment parties, reel and frame references, conveyance details, covered identifiers, classifications, statuses, and relevant dates. Known synonym and abbreviation groups may be expanded before searching, and searches containing multiple quoted phrases can receive an automatic OR broadening retry after a genuine zero-result response.

Limitations and notes

This is a US-only source. It does not return claims text, citation lists, or citation counts, so keyword matches are not a freedom-to-operate conclusion and cannot identify the claims that legally matter. Patent review for FTO still requires examining claims and obtaining appropriate legal advice.

Unfiltered searches are sorted by filing date, so recent results may be applications without a grant date. Use granted_after or granted_before when the goal is issued patents, and use filed_after or filed_before for filing activity. Grants follow a measured Tuesday cadence, while application-record freshness is not established by this integration.

Assignee names are not necessarily normalized. Aggregations should account for case differences and variations in legal suffixes. Japanese and Chinese national filings are not included, and European research requires a separate EPO-based integration.