[Guest Post] Will the “Human in the Loop” please stand up? Recap from Search and Examination Matters 2026
Rose Hughes
[Guest Post] Will the “Human in the Loop” please stand up? Recap from Search and Examination Matters 2026
With the legal world still in a frenzy following the release of Anthropic's Claude legal plugin (and the corresponding plumet in legal software company stocks), how is the patent industry responding to the AI revolution? Katfriend and AI-patent aficionado Bastian Best reports for IPKat on the EPO's recent AI-themed Search and Examination Matters, 2026.
Over to Bastian:
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that an IP conference in the 2020s must be in want of an AI panel. But at this year’s Search and Examination Matters 2026, the European Patent Office (EPO) didn’t just host a panel; they threw an AI party and invited the algorithms to sit at the head of the table.
This Katfriend tuned in to the online proceedings from Munich to see if the robots have finally taken over Bob-van-Benthem-Platz. The answer, according to the EPO, is a resounding "No", but they are certainly redecorating the office.
Here are the key takeaways from a few days of deep diving into the EPO’s digital brain.
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The Mantra: "AI Assists, Humans Decide"
If you had a drinking game for every time a speaker said "Human-Centric," you wouldn’t have made it past the opening remarks by Steve Rowan (Vice President Patent Granting Process, EPO). The EPO is keenly aware of the anxiety surrounding automated examination, maintaining an unwavering official line: AI assists, humans decide.
Angel Aledo Lopez (COO/CTO, EPO) reinforced this mantra while presenting some eye-watering statistics: AI-related patent applications have increased 45-fold since 2015. He offered a nuanced look at the EPO's internal AI policy, which seeks to balance transformative potential with necessary caution. The Office sees AI as the key to long-term sustainability, promising efficiency gains and broader accessibility through tools like real-time translation. The goal? To free up human resources for "higher-value activities." However, Lopez was candid about the disruptive nature of the technology, stressing that the EPO is actively managing risks around fairness, transparency, and data protection to ensure decisions remain accountable in an era of evolving standards.
Shaping the Future: Not Just a Typewriter Upgrade
This Katfriend also had the opportunity to join Åsa Ribbe (Principal Director Search & Patent Grant Products, EPO) on stage for the session "How AI is Shaping the Tools for the Future", where we contrasted the examiner and attorney perspectives.
Åsa Ribbe lifted the lid on the EPO's "Active Search Division" concept. She detailed how AI is raising the baseline for quality by handling data-heavy tasks like pre-search and classification, allowing examiners to focus on legal reasoning. Ribbe emphasized that while AI tools can improve search coverage and output structure, the bar for patentability remains unchanged, AI raises the baseline without lowering the bar. She also introduced the rollout of AI-assisted minutes for oral proceedings, a tool designed to increase predictability (though likely to raise a few eyebrows among those fond of arguing over the exact wording of a submission).
My own contribution focused on the risks of the "one-click" culture promoted by some commercial AI-assisted patent drafting tools. I argued that we risk becoming "intellectual tourists" in our own files if we let AI do the driving without looking at the map. The goal for attorneys must be to master AI as a "tool for thought", a provocateur to challenge and elevate our human reasoning, with efficiency gains being a pleasant by-product (see also the recent IPKat post on a similar theme).
The Toolkit: ANSERA and the New Toys
The star of the technical show remains ANSERA, the EPO’s internal search tool that makes traditional Boolean searching look like an abacus. But the ecosystem around it is exploding:
1. The Rise of the Standards
In a fascinating joint session on standard documentation, Stefan Klocke (Director, EPO) and Abderrahim Moumen (Director, EPO) revealed that the EPO’s databases now hold over 5.5 million SDO (Standard Development Organisation) documents. Why does this matter? Because if you are drafting in telecommunications (hello, 6G), broadcasting, or electronics, your prior art isn't just in patent databases; it's buried in a Working Group contribution from a meeting in 2019. The EPO has direct feeds from ETSI, 3GPP, ITU, IEEE, and others. If your novelty search doesn't cover these "grey literature" documents, you are flying blind. Klocke and Moumen showcased how ANSERA now allows for "time travel" through standard drafts, letting examiners pinpoint the exact meeting contribution where a feature was first disclosed, a powerful capability when every day of priority counts.
2. The Legal Interactive Platform (LIP)
Sonia Perez Diez (Director Online User Engagement, EPO) introduced LIP, a generative-AI tool trained on the EPC, Guidelines, and case law. It comes as a chatbot fully integrated into the MyEPO environment. Perez Diez shared a useful "cheat sheet" of Best Practices for getting the most out of the tool (and perhaps avoiding a generic refusal):
- Write better prompts: Context is king. "The more specific, the better."
- Iterate: Don't just take the first answer; reformulate your query using the chat to refine the results.
- Hygiene: Start a new chat if you change topics to avoid confusing the context window.
- Pitfalls to avoid: Don't SHOUT (capitalising without meaning), don't ask questions that are too broad, and avoid using number-only references which can confuse the model. Most importantly: validate the response. The tool cites its sources, check them.
The "SeqPilot" Saga: A Lifecycle Story
In a stroke of presentation genius, the conference used a fictional invention, SeqPilot, an AI-driven DNA sequencer, to trace the life of a patent.
This narrative arc, presented by Eugenio Archontopoulos (Team manager, EPO), Alexander Heidrich (Examiner, EPO), Rainer Kaysan (Head of Innovation Networks, EPO) and patent attorneys, was brilliant for showing how different EPO tools kick in at different stages:
- Pre-Search: Before an examiner even reads the file, AI has already clustered potential prior art.
- Classification: AI suggests the CPC symbols (which drives the allocation to the examining division).
- Examination: The "Active Search Division" concept means three examiners collaborate earlier.
The takeaway for applicants? The examiner often has a "pre-cooked" list of documents before they open your file. Your drafting needs to be precise enough to distinguish your invention from the AI-identified cluster immediately.
Drafting AI Inventions: The "Black Box" Checklist
For practitioners struggling to draft AI claims that survive the EPO’s scrutiny, the session by Javier Pose Rodríguez (Examiner, EPO) and Jan-Christian Schütte (Patent attorney, epi) was gold dust.
They tackled the "Black Box" problem head-on. The EPO is doubling down on Sufficiency of Disclosure (Art. 83 EPC) for AI. It is not enough to say "a neural network determines X." The EPO's "Checklist" for your AI disclosure now effectively includes:
- Model Selection: Which model (CNN, RNN, Transformer) and why?
- Data: What are the input/output variables? What are the dimensions?
- Training: How was it trained? Where did the data come from? (Synthetic? Real-world?)
- Validation: Evidence that it actually works across the claimed range.
PATLIBs: The Unsung Heroes
Rainer Kaysan shone a spotlight on the PATLIB network (Patent Information Centres). These aren't just dusty libraries anymore. They are being equipped with the EPO’s high-end tools (like ANSERA and the Deep Tech Finder) to support SMEs and universities. If you have clients in the early "idea phase" who can't afford a full clearance search yet, pointing them to a PATLIB centre might be a strategic move.
Conclusion
Search and Examination Matters 2026 confirmed that the EPO is undergoing a profound digital transformation, evolving into a high-tech ecosystem where AI is central to the patent granting process.
For the European patent attorney, the message is clear: The examiner is essentially becoming an AI-augmented cyborg. If you show up to the fight with nothing but a highlighter and printed copies of the application and your pleading notes, you will lose. We patent attorneys must learn how to use AI meaningfully to improve our profession just as the EPO does.
The AI assists, the humans decide... but the AI is doing a lot of the heavy lifting."
Further reading