Physical AI Patent Landscape is a study of the patents behind machines that perceive, decide and move in the physical world. The August 2026 edition covers more than 240,000 patent families across 578 organisations, grouped into the layers of the stack and set against the commercial record of the companies that hold them.
This post is a summary. The full report is available at no charge.
Key figures at a glance
- More than 240,000 patent families across 578 organisations, with a patent-evidence cutoff of June 2026.
- Figure AI, at a $39 billion valuation, holds 48 published component families. UBTECH holds 2,058.
- China has filed several times more families than Japan in recent years. Japan holds the larger accumulated estate.
- Only 7% of Chinese holders’ families are also published outside China.
- Perception and motors together account for roughly three quarters of the corpus.
What the study found
Do patent counts track company valuations?
Figure AI, valued at $39 billion, holds 48 published component families; Apptronik, at $5.3 billion, holds 16. UBTECH holds 2,058 Brain and Body families and Boston Dynamics 920 — not the order the valuations would suggest. Valuation does not rise consistently with patent count, and several young AI developers carry high valuations with no published families at all, which the report attributes to company age, publication timing or filing strategy.
Who holds more robotics patents, Japan or China?
China filed several times more patent families than Japan over the last five years, with more than half of its portfolio dating from that period. Japan holds the larger accumulated estate. Recent filing volume and accumulated position are different rankings.
Are Chinese-held patents protected internationally?
Only 7% of Chinese holders’ families are also published outside China. The report lists several possible reasons, including the size of the home market and the cost of filing abroad, and states that the data cannot determine their relative importance. Openness measured the other way round — inward rather than outward — puts the United States first: 70% of the families filed there include a foreign-origin holder, the highest inward share among the principal jurisdictions.
Which technology areas dominate the corpus?
Perception and motors together account for roughly three quarters of the corpus. Neither is a narrow robotics category: the perception record combines long-established automotive sensing, semiconductor imaging and industrial vision with newer autonomy and robotics work. Power and thermal management is the smallest group, and has the highest share of recent filings.
What is in the report
- Method and global overview. How the corpus was built, then the global picture by region, technology group, filing geography and holder.
- Brain. Perception; compute; models, learning, planning and control.
- Body. Hands and manipulation; motors and actuators; transmissions; power and thermal management.
- Robot integrators. How the layers combine in complete machines, with published positions set against revenue and reported valuation, including within-region correlations between portfolio size and revenue.
How the corpus was built
GoVeda served as both the patent database and the search platform, drawing on more than 220 million patent publications from 108 jurisdictions. Keyword and semantic retrieval produced a candidate pool of about 2.94 million records, and each candidate was then assessed on its full technical content rather than on its title, keywords or classification codes. The retained documents were grouped into simple patent families, the counting unit used in WIPO landscape reports . Counts for any single company follow the same principle as searching a portfolio by assignee: one invention, counted once.
Family counts describe disclosed inventive activity. They do not measure claim breadth, validity, enforceability, remaining term or commercial value, and unpublished applications, trade secrets, software and data can fall outside the record. The report is not a freedom-to-operate or validity opinion.
Availability
The full report, with the figures and the company-level detail behind this summary, is available from the GoVeda Research page at no charge.
Disclaimer: This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, patent, financial or investment advice. Patent counts described here are observed portfolio positions, not measures of claim breadth, validity or freedom to operate, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security. For decisions about your specific situation, consult a qualified patent attorney, agent or professional adviser. GoVeda makes no warranty as to the accuracy or completeness of the information presented.