The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has fully adopted Scout LLM, its enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) tool, for trademark use.
“SCOUT” is an acronym that stands for Searching, Consolidating, Outlining, Understanding Tool.
The tool is now being used by all trademark work units, including by examining attorneys.
According to a USPTO press release,
Built on the USPTO’s Unified Generative AI Platform, this large language model-based tool enables employees to work faster, more efficiently, and with greater effectiveness. Examining attorneys lead, tools support. Scout LLM summarizes information, analyzes data, researches topics, and drafts selectable content for general audiences. Designed with USPTO policies, guardrails, and workflows in mind, it supports the agency’s complex and fast-moving environment.
A video demo of the new tool can be viewed here.
According to the video, the tool allows users to summarize, analyze, research, create or improve content using models from OpenAI, Google Anthropic, and others.
The USPTO says the models are set up so that they don’t allow for data sharing. I.e., the models don’t train on USPTO data.
Among other things, the SCOUT tool lets USPTO staffers write emails and summarize documents.
The tool lets users create summaries of legal documents that a third-grader could understand, according to the video.
Some participants in the patent examiner reddit group have been less than enthusiastic about the new tool. Some commented about lack of access or training or called its outputs “nonsense” or “worthless.”
In another reddit thread from two months ago, a user expressed concerns about:
1 – No training or training time (yet 🙄).
2 – public trust info
3 – public transparency in it’s [sic] use
4 – consistency in implementation
5 – wasted resources
The USPTO previously introduced Class ACT, which has analyzed 250,000 trademark applications so far.
The agency says that Class ACT cuts trademark classification prep from 5 months to 5 minutes – or even five seconds, according to USPTO Director John A. Squires. The tool “can immediately assign international classes to unclassified applications, as well as the design search codes and pseudo marks that make these records searchable.”
According to the USPTO,
Trademark applications with logos, designs, unconventional spelling, or no international class can make searching difficult. Historically, USPTO employees add design search codes, pseudo marks, and international classification to make finding these applications easier. However, the surge in trademark applications caused this process to take several months, affecting examination and our customers.
AI, said Senior USPTO Legal Advisor Kathleen Cooney-Porter, “can provide this information immediately at a high level of accuracy.”
The information is still reviewed by humans.
According to the USPTO,
Class ACT assigns international classes, identifies design search codes, and generates pseudo marks. The tool also supports external users by generating a proposed mark description and color claim in Trademark Center.
Earlier this year, the agency introduced an AI-enabled image search tool that allows customers to upload an image and find similar marks.
As Bloomberg Law recently noted, the USPTO also has an opt-in automated search pilot program that uses AI:
The automated search tool uses an application’s cooperative patent classification designation, specification, claims, and abstract to identify up to 10 potentially relevant prior art documents, according to the October 2025 notice. Applicants can consider these references before formal examination and, if appropriate, amend their claims to expedite prosecution and overcome obstacles posed by the AI-identified references.
The USPTO introduced a similar option four years ago. According to Bloomberg,
To date, these tools haven’t fundamentally altered the patent examination process. But the rapid pace of AI advancement suggests their influence is likely to grow.
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