The Project
All the Patents is a project created by Damien Riehl and Mike Bommarito that seeks to push the boundaries of what constitutes an “obvious” invention under patent law – all using LLM-backed vector embeddings.
The project serves as a defensive prior art tool. By generating every possible combination of existing patent claims and establishing them as prior art, it prevents future patents based on trivial recombination of established elements.
Origins
The project was inspired by the successful All the Music project, which computationally composed over 400 billion melodies and released them into the public domain via Creative Commons Zero (CC0).
Mike Bommarito approached Damien Riehl saying: “I love what you did with copyrights. Wouldn’t it be great to do that for patents?”
The Creators
Damien Riehl is an attorney and technologist who has worked at the intersection of law and technology. He is known for his TEDx talk on copyrighting all the melodies and his work on computational approaches to intellectual property.
Mike Bommarito is co-founder of 273 Ventures and the Kelvin Legal Data OS platform. He brings expertise in legal data, AI, and large-scale computational systems.
Broader Context
The project reflects concerns about patent system collapse under AI pressure, where machines could generate countless patent variations, overwhelming the system with questionable claims. By pre-emptively establishing prior art through the generation of all possible combinations of existing patent claims, the project aims to raise the bar for what qualifies as a patentable (non-obvious) invention.