Over a decade ago, when few outside tech circles and computer science departments could have imagined AI’s reach into everyday life, the University of Tennessee secured two patents for artificial neural networks. Last week the university’s research foundation sued Anthropic in a federal court in Delaware for infringing the rights to those patents. It’s the first time a university has sued an AI company and could open the doors to more universities claiming their stake in the AI revolution.
In its court filing, the University of Tennessee Research Foundation (UTRF) said the patented inventions “reflect years of research conducted at The University of Tennessee concerning biologically inspired approaches to machine intelligence.”
Tennessee is far from the only academic institution doing pioneering research that has led to discoveries now used in AI technology. Frontier AI companies—the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind—are built on knowledge developed in universities over the past century. The Turing test, a foundational measurement of machine intelligence, was published by British mathematician Alan Turing in 1950 while he was at the University of Manchester. Dartmouth College claims the term “artificial intelligence” was coined by its researchers in 1956. And researchers at Carnegie Mellon and UC San Diego, including the “Godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, developed the artificial neural networks that form the foundation for deep learning.
