USPTO: ~$8.91M for examiner "image search" AI — a federal contract with Clarivate (USAspending)

1Prior-art search as the core step

A core step in patent examination is the "prior-art search" — checking an invention against a large body of existing material. Beyond text-based patent-search AI (see our separate article on the Accenture Federal USPTO patent-search contract), the USPTO is also procuring AI to assist image searching, showing that search support is expanding from text to drawings and images.

Patents contain a great deal of image information — design figures, specification drawings — so making image search more efficient can affect examination quality and speed (the specific capabilities and performance are not stated in the scope, so we do not infer them).

2Clarivate as the data provider

3Thirty-six awarding offices

The 222 federal spending records this site holds as of 2026-09-01 come from 36 awarding offices. The Air Force leads with 61, then the Army with 45, DARPA with 14, Veterans Affairs with 10, Washington Headquarters Services with 9 and the Missile Defense Agency with 8.

The top of the list is internal to the Department of Defense. At department level there are 15; drop to the office level and it becomes 36, showing that separate offices within one department buy AI separately. A record awarded by the patent office, as here, belongs to the tail of that spread.