Big Tech’s Fifteen Most Interesting New Patents This Week (9/4/2026)

A weekly read of what the world’s biggest technology companies just told the U.S. patent office.

A lighter week by the numbers: we wrote up 179 filings, with Samsung out front at 30, then Sony at 28, Microsoft at 27, and Google at 26. Meta, Amazon, and OpenAI published nothing at all. The full run lives under this week’s Big Tech patents; these fifteen stood out.

1. Tesla Patents a Laser That Cleans Windshields by Firing Rapid Light Bursts

A bird finds your windshield, a dust storm finds your solar roof, and something has to clean it off. Today that is a wiper blade, a squirt of fluid, or a person with a hose. Tesla has filed for a laser that fires short bursts at the debris and blasts it off the glass without touching it.

The car first looks at what has built up, then sets the laser’s intensity and pulse rate to burn away the debris while stopping short of the glass. The whole design turns on keeping the laser’s reach shallower than the glass is thick, so the surface comes clean and the pane underneath never heats past a safe point. Think of a dentist’s tool that takes off plaque and leaves the tooth alone, except it is light instead of metal.

The payoff is not the windshield. It is the cameras and sensors a self-driving car depends on, which sit behind tiny nozzles that clean them badly, and the solar panels on a roof that nobody climbs up to wash. A laser with no moving parts fixes the lens before the driver notices it was dirty.

Two things worth knowing. This is a continuation of a filing from September 2021 with a single named inventor, so it is a long-held idea rather than a new push. And the open question is the one the document does not answer: whether a laser that behaves in a lab makes the right call about ice, road salt, and a bug at highway speed.

2. Sony Files Patent for a System That Predicts Sleepwalking Before You Fall Asleep

Millions of people who sleepwalk go to bed with no idea whether tonight is one of those nights. Sony has filed for a system that reads your body before you sleep and scores how likely you are to sleepwalk.

It works in two stages. Before you sleep, a device collects signals like heart rate and stress markers and turns them into a risk score for the night ahead. Once you are asleep, a second layer watches your movement and position, and it uses that score to decide how sensitive to be: closer attention on a high-risk night, fewer false alarms on a low-risk one.

For a parent who currently relies on a baby monitor and hope, a warning before bedtime is a window to act: a door sensor, a safer room, a call to the doctor if the pattern is getting worse.

The honest catch is stage one. Nobody has shown which pre-sleep signals predict sleepwalking well enough to be useful, and the filing does not claim to have either. That is a clinical question, not an engineering one. Stage two, the movement detector that tunes itself to the score, could be built with sensors that already sit in a smartwatch.

3. Disney Patents a Way to Train Theme Park Robots to Act Without a Human Puppeteer

When a life-size robot character looks you in the eye at a Disney park and reacts to what you do, a skilled human is usually steering every gesture from somewhere nearby. Disney has filed for a way to teach the robot to do that job on its own by copying the operators.

The company records what human operators tell the robot to do, along with where the robot’s head and arms were at each moment, and trains an AI on the pairs. The training method is the same family that powers image generators: scramble a correct command with noise, then teach the model to recover it. After enough rounds, the model can produce the next move from the situation in front of it, without a person at the controls.

One operator can run one robot at a time, and that is the cost Disney is trying to break. A robot that carries a typical interaction on its own frees the humans for the moments that need them.

The trade is in the word typical. A puppeteer reads a nervous child and improvises; a model trained on recordings reproduces the average performance, which means it should handle ordinary moments well and unusual ones flat. Eight named inventors and a provisional filed in February 2025 suggest this is active work, not a shelf idea.

4. Microsoft Patents Context-Triggered In-Game Ad Breaks That Pause Gameplay

You are mid-fight and an ad cuts in. Microsoft has filed for an ad system that waits for the game to signal a natural break, then pauses you and pays you in playtime for watching.

You get a block of uninterrupted play. As it nears the end, the system opens a short listening window. The game sends hints when a good stopping point arrives, such as the end of a round or a loading screen. A hint that lands before the window opens is ignored; one that lands inside it pauses the session, plays a video ad, and grants a fresh block of time.

Ad-supported tiers for game subscriptions have been discussed for years, and an ad shown at a real pause is more likely to be watched than one that interrupts a boss fight. The credit loop is the part that would change how a free tier feels.

The claim is narrower than the headline. It only covers systems where the game itself raises its hand before the interruption, so an ad that fires on a timer from a server falls outside it. And this is a continuation of a filing from May 2023, so Microsoft has been sitting on the design for a while. Whether players read a well-timed ad as courtesy or as a game reporting on them is the argument the filing will start.

5. Sony Patents a System That Reads Your Mood Mid-Game to Keep You Playing

Most people who quit a game do it at a predictable spot: a brutal difficulty spike, a puzzle with no way in, a long stretch where nothing happens. Sony has filed for a system that reads how you are feeling as you approach those spots and nudges you before you give up.

The game keeps a list of milestones. As you near one, a background tool starts reading signals about your emotional state; the filing leaves the signal type open, which could mean voice, face, or how you are handling the controller. If the read says frustrated or checked out, the game sends a message, a hint, or a reward before you reach the milestone, not after you have failed it three times.

A well-timed word at the exact moment of frustration is a different thing from a generic pop-up, and for a studio it is a direct answer to the drop-off that costs the most.

The part players never see is the part that matters. The game draws conclusions about your mood and decides whether to intervene before you have decided anything yourself. The filing, from a single inventor, says nothing about where that emotional data goes after the session, and that silence is the story.

6. Sony Patents a Way to Clone Your Co-op Teammate as an AI Bot

Your friend has to leave mid-session, and the game hands you a filler bot that ignores every strategy you built together. Sony has filed for a stand-in built from the real player’s own habits.

The system keeps a profile of how a specific person plays: how aggressive they are, which role they take, how fast they react, what tactics they favor. When someone drops out, a computer-controlled character loads that profile and plays the part. The filing also lets you load someone else’s profile on purpose, which is a polite way of saying you could recruit a copy of a player you admire.

Co-op games live on the feeling that you and specific people built something together, and a generic substitute kills it. A replacement that echoes how your friend plays is a different kind of object.

The catch is that the filing describes the shape of the profile, not what fills it. Which attributes get tracked, and whether a handful of numbers can carry the feel of a person’s play, is left open. Sony filed the international version of this in March 2024, so the idea predates the current wave of AI teammates.

7. Google Patents an On-Device AI That Writes Your Emergency Message For You

In a real emergency you are expected to stay calm and give precise details, and most people cannot. Google has filed for a phone feature that takes whatever you manage to say or type and turns it into a clean, structured emergency message.

You say something like “I fell hiking, my ankle, I can’t move, near the waterfall trail.” An AI language model running on the phone pulls out the location, the injury, and the situation, and writes the alert a responder needs. If you are on a satellite link where every byte counts, it compresses the message rather than cutting it off. Because the model runs on the device, it does not need a data connection to think.

Satellite emergency texting already ships on phones from several makers, and its limit is how little text fits through. Compressing the message with judgment instead of a hard cut is a real upgrade for hikers and drivers in the places a cell tower does not reach.

The claim is wide: any method that takes a free-form description of an emergency, runs it through a language model, and sends the result. Two inventors, fourteen claims, no restriction on device or model. The fight at the patent office will be whether “emergency” is enough to set this apart from years of prior work on turning speech into forms.

8. Microsoft Patents Software That Attends Meetings and Reports Key Details Back to You

Six meetings today, three you can attend, and the other three still contain decisions about your projects. Microsoft has filed for software agents that sit in the meetings you skip and bring back only the parts that concern you.

Each agent is assigned to one session, a video call or a chat thread, and watches all of it. It knows enough about your role and interests to recognize when something applies to you, sets those moments aside, and hands you a filtered digest afterward. Several agents can run at once, one per meeting, which is the step beyond summarizing a single call after the fact.

Everything here is software. Recordings, transcripts, and automatic summaries already exist inside meeting tools, so the distance from filing to feature is shorter than usual.

The hard problem is not technical. Everyone else on the call would need to know a silent stand-in is there, and you would need to trust what it chose to leave out. This is a continuation of a filing from April 2021 by a single inventor, Ryen White, which means the idea was on paper before the current run of AI assistants made it plausible.

9. Google Patents a System for Letting Users Block Individual Search Results

When a search result about you is wrong or unwanted, today you fill out a form and wait in the dark. Google has filed for a formal pipeline that takes a request to hide a specific result and decides what to do with it.

You flag one result for one query. The system looks at the result, the search term, and your account, and makes one of three calls: approve automatically, deny automatically, or hand it to a human reviewer. An approved request stops that result appearing for that query from then on. It can also spread: the system may hide related results, or block similar queries you never mentioned.

For anyone whose name surfaces an old news story or a forum post, a process with a visible decision and a human track is a different experience from a form that never writes back.

The spreading piece is the sharp edge. A single approved request could suppress more than the person asked for, which reads as a convenience or an overreach depending on how the classifier is tuned. The claim is broad enough that any competitor building a user-controlled suppression tool would have to steer around it, and this is a division of a filing from July 2024 with nine inventors, so it is not a sketch.

10. Samsung Patents a Display That Doubles as a Wireless Charging Pad

Set your earbuds on your phone screen and they charge. Samsung Display has filed for a screen with wireless charging coils woven into its own layers.

Below the pixels, the display stack carries lines of electrodes that cross the wiring already there. Two groups of those lines receive the same electrical signal, with the second group running a fraction of a step behind. That small timing offset produces a magnetic field, the same effect every charging pad uses, and it does so without adding a separate coil to the back of the phone or stealing space from the touch layer.

The obvious use is small accessories, earbuds and styluses, charged face-up on the phone. The less obvious one is a reverse charger that costs no internal room.

Display layers are extremely touchy about interference, and the filing describes the architecture without saying how it keeps a magnetic field out of the picture and the touch sensor. That is the whole engineering problem, and it is unsolved on the page. This is a continuation of a September 2024 filing, so Samsung Display has been at it for a couple of years.

11. Apple Patent Would Redecorate Your Room Based on What You’re Watching

You glance at a houseplant near the TV, and a few seconds later the screen’s colors warm, the ambient sound drifts toward nature, and the lighting follows. Apple has filed for a device that watches how long you look at something and reshapes the room to match it.

A camera tracks whether you are looking at an object and for how long, and a focus score builds the longer you attend. Past a threshold, the device studies the object, its colors, what kind of thing it is, what mood it suggests, and turns that into a target for the environment. Then it changes something: screen colors, sounds, a lighting scene.

The gaze tracking already exists in Vision Pro and the output side is software, so no exotic hardware stands between this and a shippable feature.

The gap is in the middle: reading meaningful attributes off arbitrary real-world objects in real time. The filing assumes that problem is solved rather than solving it. A continuation of a December 2022 filing, which puts the idea in the same period as the headset itself.

12. Apple Patent Reveals a Secret-Listening Chip That Wakes Phones Without Draining Battery

When your phone sits dark in your pocket, its main chip is asleep to save battery. Apple has filed for a small separate chip that stays awake listening for one specific wireless password, then wakes the phone when it hears it.

The password lives in a piece of memory the main processor cannot read at all, and a dedicated security chip uses it to compute a shared secret with whoever is allowed to send the wake-up. A low-power radio scans incoming messages for that secret while everything else stays off. Picture a bouncer who never sleeps, checking a password stored in a vault only the bouncer can open.

For a user, the point is a device that answers trusted remote commands, waking a laptop before you reach the desk, say, without running a full chip all day, and one that malware on the phone cannot fake because it cannot see the key.

Nothing here arrives by software update. An isolated chip and a sealed memory compartment have to be baked in at manufacturing, which typically means two to four years from design to a device in someone’s hand. The provisional was filed in February 2025. The filing names no product.

13. Sony Patent: AI Coach Watches You Lose, Then Helps You Win

You die to the same boss for the tenth time and the game sends you back with no advice. Sony has filed for an AI that studies your footage and your controller inputs together, then builds a practice session for the exact thing beating you.

The system reads two streams at once: video of the match, and the actual sequence of button presses and stick movements you produced. An AI model compares them to what would have worked against that opponent and produces a diagnosis. From there it can send cues to the controller itself, timed rumbles guiding your hands, or spin up a custom mini-game that drills the skill you are missing.

This is the third filing on the list about the moment a player walks away, and set against Sony’s 28 filings this week they describe a console that watches for that moment from three directions.

The ambition is bigger than a hint system, and so is the engineering. Analyzing screen and inputs fast enough to feel like coaching rather than a post-mortem is the whole challenge, and the filing does not say how quickly it works. Four inventors, no parent filing, so this one is new.

14. Apple Patents a Lock Screen for Private Browsing and a One-Tap Privacy Fix

Private browsing has two gaps. Anyone who picks up your phone can see your private tabs, and some sites refuse to load while the privacy protections are on. Apple has filed for a browser that hides private tabs behind Face ID and offers a one-page fix when protections break a site.

The lock is conditional. When the screen locks or you switch apps, Safari checks whether the private window should be hidden and, if so, asks for a face, a fingerprint, or a passcode before showing it again. The second feature watches for a page that fails to load because of tracker blocking and offers to reload just that page with the protection relaxed, instead of making you abandon private mode for the whole session.

Both fixes address ordinary moments: a phone left on a table, a laptop handed to a friend, a checkout page that will not render. Nine inventors and a continuation of a May 2024 filing say this is product work rather than a concept.

The catch is small but real. A per-page exception is only as safe as the person tapping it, and a prompt that offers to relax protection is a prompt many people will accept by reflex. The feature protects you when you forget to protect yourself, right up until it asks you to decide.

15. Apple Patents a Notification System That Knows When to Get Out of the Way

Your phone tells you to grab an umbrella after you have left the house, or suggests a route while you are already parked. Apple has filed for notifications that appear because a set of conditions is true right now and remove themselves when it stops being true.

The device watches its own context, meaning location, which app is open, the time, what you are doing. When that matches a profile, a notification appears offering an action that is not otherwise on screen. The system keeps checking the conditions, and the moment they no longer hold, the alert disappears with no swipe from you. The filing also describes notifications that carry a confidence level, a signal of how sure the phone is that this is worth your attention.

Alerts that clear themselves would thin the pile, and the ones that stay would mean more. Nothing here needs new hardware; it is code and judgment.

The judgment is the hard part. An alert that vanishes too early is useless, and one that lingers is annoying in a new way, and the filing leaves the math behind its confidence score unspecified. It closes the list as the smallest idea on it and possibly the one most people would feel first.

What ties them together

The week’s loudest thread is the machine that reads you before you have decided anything. Sony reads your mood before a hard level, scores your sleepwalking risk before you sleep, and diagnoses your losses before you ask; Apple measures how long you stare at a houseplant and clears a notification the instant it stops applying; Microsoft waits for the game to say it is a good time to interrupt. Prediction has moved from what you type to what you are about to do, and none of these filings says where the readings go afterward.

The other column is stand-ins. Sony clones an absent teammate from their own habits, Microsoft sends an agent to the meeting you skipped, Disney trains a robot on the puppeteer it will replace, and Google writes the emergency message you were too panicked to write. Last week’s list was about interfaces moving closer to the body; this week the software has started standing in for the body. The one filing that cuts the other way is Google’s pipeline for hiding a search result, which for once hands a decision back to the person, right up to the moment it decides to hide a little more than they asked.

Patentlyze reads every new patent application that Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, Samsung, OpenAI, Qualcomm, Sony, Intel, AMD, IBM, Adobe, Salesforce, Tesla, Amazon, and Disney file at the USPTO, and writes a plain-English breakdown of the ones that say something about where products are heading. New filings drop every Thursday.