Patent drafting with agents
Provisional patent from scratch: claim hierarchy, prior-art search, evidence ledger, and the CIPHER workflow. With real QC examples.
What agents can and can’t do in patent work
Quantum Caddy assembled a patent package on April 19 — 482 lines of claim drafts, prior art analysis, and a 36-commit evidence ledger. The patent attorney engagement is the current critical-path legal item (Patent Week 1 on the Kanban). The Cipher content-safety pass is required before any filing action. The provisional patent has not been filed; that requires the attorney.
This is the correct division of labor. CIPHER can draft claims with specific technical language, run prior-art searches against USPTO PAIR and Google Patents, build and maintain the evidence ledger, and annotate each prior-art reference with how the QC claims are distinguished. What CIPHER cannot do: file with any authority, represent terms to any party, act as legal counsel, or provide legal advice. CIPHER is a drafting and research agent.
The value CIPHER adds is significant. A first-draft claim set from CIPHER — with QC-specific technical language about the triple-layer fusion architecture, the physics filter in ThrowDetector._finalize_throw, the confidence-weighted fusion at 0.70/0.85 thresholds — gives the attorney a technically accurate starting point rather than a blank page. Attorneys bill for drafting and research. An agent that produces a strong first draft reduces attorney hours. TPL-2026-015 measures this effect in practice.
The patent scope implication of the April 22 sensor pivot is also live: FSR-specific component claims (routed pocket, Zener clamp) should be replaced or supplemented with broader method-level fusion claims (RGB + depth-ToF + radar + automatic training-label generation) after the bench validation of the Acconeer A121 and ST VL53L8CX. CIPHER’s claims drafts should reflect the current sensor strategy, not the superseded FSR strategy.
The provisional patent workflow
A provisional patent application establishes a priority date — the date from which novelty and prior art are assessed. It doesn’t require formal claims, but the description must be enabling: sufficient detail that a person of ordinary skill in the art could practice the invention. You have 12 months from filing to convert to a non-provisional or the priority date is lost.
| Step | Who does it | Output |
|---|---|---|
| 1 — Invention disclosure | Inventor + CIPHER | Technical description: what it does, how it does it, what’s novel |
| 2 — Evidence ledger | AXIOM + CIPHER | Commits, test results, artifacts tagged to claim elements with dates |
| 3 — Prior-art search | CIPHER | Annotated reference table: each reference with distinction and risk level |
| 4 — Claim drafts | CIPHER | Claim set with hierarchy: independent method, independent system, dependent implementation claims |
| 5 — Technical accuracy review | AXIOM + inventor | Claims annotated for technical accuracy; any incorrect or over-broad claims flagged |
| 6 — Attorney review + filing | USPTO attorney | Amended claims, filed provisional application |
CIPHER’s deliverable is the package at the end of step 4. Steps 5 and 6 require humans. No CIPHER session ends with a filing action — it ends with a draft that goes to AXIOM for technical review, then to the attorney.
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Patent drafting with agents
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