What Today's USPTO Decision Means. And What it Doesn't.
Krisp announced today that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has agreed to review six Sanas patents that Krisp challenged. Here’s what happened, what comes next, and what it changes about our case against Krisp.
The short answer? Very little.
What Happened
Sanas sued Krisp in federal court in California last year. One of the ways Krisp has chosen to defend itself is to ask the USPTO's Patent Trial and Appeal Board to review whether the six patents we asserted should have been granted in the first place. Today the Board agreed to take that second look.
At this stage, the Patent Office was deciding whether Krisp's petitions raise enough of a question to justify a full proceeding. It's a preliminary call made on the petitions and our initial responses, before the introduction of the full record, expert testimony, and argument. The Board had two options: decline the challenges outright, or open a review. It chose the second.
Before making a decision with real consequences for two companies, the Patent Office wants to be sure it gets it right. We'd want the same rigor if the positions were reversed. Sanas is confident in the validity of its patents and looks forward to the Board's consideration of the robust evidence Sanas will put forward.
What Comes Next
Each of the six patents now gets its own review, on its own merits. The Board typically issues final decisions within about a year of instituting a proceeding, so by this time next year the outcome of each one will be public. Some claims may be upheld, some may be narrowed, some may not survive. They're independent of one another.
What Doesn't Change
Our case against Krisp was never only about patents. The case also alleges trade secret misappropriation, false advertising, and other claims. Between 2021 and 2022, Krisp met with Sanas under a non-disclosure agreement and got detailed access to our technology and how we’ve built it. Krisp ended those discussions, and within months filed its own patent applications and brought a competing accent product to market.
Trade secrets are the know-how behind a product: the methods, the approaches, the hard-earned lessons that never appear in a patent filing. Whether a given patent survives review says nothing about whether trade secrets were taken and used. Those claims are before the district court, not the USPTO, and they continue regardless of how the patent reviews come out.
Sanas holds patents (far) beyond the six at issue, and our business has never depended on any single one of them. What we ship, what we're building, and our commitments to customers remain unchanged.
We'll share updates as the proceedings move forward.
The case is Sanas.AI Inc. v. Krisp Technologies, Inc., No. 3:25-cv-05666, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Public filings are available at krisplitigation.com.