Flinn AI Technologies sues Anthropic and OpenAI over attention-based neural network patents

Flinn Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technologies, a company based in Woodville, Texas, filed patent infringement suits against Anthropic and OpenAI in the US District Court for the District of Delaware on November 12, 2026. The court has marked the two cases as related.

Both complaints assert the same five US patents, each titled "Iterative attention-based neural network training and processing" and issued between February and December 2025. The named inventors, Steven D. Flinn and Naomi Felina Moneypenny, assigned the patents to the company. According to the complaints, the patents claim priority to applications filed in August 2015 and January 2016 that describe architectures in which a neural network directs multiple attentions to different portions of information and uses the resulting probabilities to guide further processing.

The complaint against Anthropic names the Claude model family and products including Claude Code, Claude Cowork and the Claude API. The complaint against OpenAI names ChatGPT, Codex, the OpenAI API and GPT models from GPT-3.5 onward. Flinn says both companies built their businesses on the architectures the patents recite.

Flinn alleges willful infringement and asks for damages of no less than a reasonable royalty, enhanced damages of up to three times that amount, an ongoing royalty and attorneys' fees. It has demanded a jury trial.