Coalition Letter Supporting USPTO's Effort to Improve PTAB

January 14, 2026 

Dear Director Hassett and Ms. Wiles: 

We write as conservative leaders to advise you of our strong support of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to improve the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (PTAB) practices for instituting inter partes review (IPR) challenges (Docket No. PTO-P-2025-0025). The proposal would help restore fairness, efficiency, and predictability to patent adjudication. Such are principles that Congress pledged in the America Invents Act (AIA), but that years of serial and duplicative challenges and bias for patent claim invalidation have eroded. 

Congress intended IPRs to serve as a faster, less costly alternative to district court litigation, not a second front for infringers to keep attacking patents until they are worn down or invalidated. Yet today, more than half of IPR petitions—filed by the same large corporations such as Apple and others—represent repeat challenges against the same patent. More than 80 percent of IPRs overlap with ongoing litigation. This has created a system that multiplies uncertainty and imposes duplicative costs on inventors, the opposite of the efficient alternative Congress promised. 

By requiring petitioners to stipulate that they will not pursue overlapping §102 or §103 invalidity arguments and by declining to institute review where claims have already survived judicial or administrative scrutiny, the USPTO’s proposal faithfully implements the “one bite at the apple” principle that Congress claimed to be making law. The rule also allows USPTO to consider the effects of its regulations on “the economy [and] the integrity of the patent system.” 

Reliable patent rights are the lifeblood of America’s innovation economy. They give investors the confidence to finance risky, long-horizon research and allow small inventors and startups to compete on equal footing with well-established firms. When patents can be relitigated endlessly before multiple tribunals, investment dries up, technology transfer stalls, and only the largest firms, with the resources to absorb the cost of serial proceedings, can compete. 

In USPTO Director John Squires’s recent statement before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, he effectively connected the dots not just between strong patent protection and America’s economic vitality, but also our national security. Weak, uncertain patent rights invite foreign competitors and adversarial regimes to infringe American innovations with impunity. By restoring finality and predictability, the proposed rule will help secure the unique intellectual property foundation of U.S. leadership in critical technologies from AI to quantum computing.