Heads up: complete your USPTO profile by August 18

Wolfgang Stark

Wolfgang Stark

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Heads up: complete your USPTO profile by August 18
EP0298323A1 - Siemens Aktiengesellschaft - 1989

Since June, the Open Data Portal requires a registered USPTO.gov account. Now four profile fields have become mandatory: Job Title, Organization Name, Organization Type, and Intended Use. The deadline is August 18, 2026. If the fields are missing, your API access may be interrupted.

Filling them in takes two minutes: sign in at account.uspto.gov, navigate to Open Data Portal, complete the fields, save. Done.

uspto-odp 1.6.10

The uspto-odp Go library is at v1.6.10. The main fix concerns petition decisions: the official spec declares the by-ID response type as a single-member allOf with the documents array as a sibling property. Code generators silently drop that array with this shape, so documentBag never reached the generated types. The generator now rewrites the schema into a well-formed two-member allOf, and the field survives.

Credit where it is due: the ODP team keeps acting on reports. Since my last post on the evolving API, the Office Action endpoint migration has been completed cleanly (proper JSON responses, consistent key-based auth), and the assignment field that moved to geographicRegionCode is now documented in the spec. Reporting things to this team is not a write-only operation, which is rare and appreciated.

New finding for the ODP wishlist

Verified against the live API in August 2026:

  • GET /api/v1/petition/decisions/{id}?includeDocuments=true returns HTTP 500 for every record we tested, from 2004 to 2026.

Patent Connector 1.8.2

The Patent Connector picks these changes up and adds a few of its own

  • Petition decisions now include the issues considered, the 37 CFR rules and 35 USC statutes cited, petition type, art unit, and inventors. All of it is searchable: ruleBag:"1.181" finds 389 decisions, statuteBag:"35 USC 132" works the same way, date ranges included.
  • The decision text itself only exists as PDFs in the application's file wrapper, and USPTO's includeDocuments parameter is broken upstream. get_petition therefore joins the decision documents server-side and returns them with direct download links.
  • Bare US application numbers ("16517705") now work everywhere without formatting, and invalid numbers return a clear format hint instead of a generic error.
  • get_search_syntax documents the full petition query grammar.

ChatGPT: approved, reconnect if tools look stale

The new Patent Connector version is approved in the ChatGPT connector directory, so the latest tools are available when you connect through the official listing. One practical note: ChatGPT caches a connector's tool list and does not reliably refresh it. If a tool seems missing or behaves oddly, remove the connector and add it again.

Claude: a real directory process, finally

Anthropic has replaced the old Google Form with a proper submission and review flow for connector listings. That is a welcome step. The Patent Connector listing is pending review there, and I am looking forward to it going live.

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