Ask HN: Can You Patent Prompts?
I decided to ask this question because of a rather contrived informal discussion I'm involved in with colleagues from both academia and industry, neither of which are lawyers but who share a few concerns about how we can go about creating new "things" and intellectual property in an increasingly AI-centric world. You can take prompts as "processes", or "embodiments" or any variation on intellectual property, but I'd love to know what people think about this--my particular concern was that if you ship your software as Open Source, could someone nitpick over your prompts and claim they were taken from their IP/software? How valid would this be given that prompts are, essentially language? How detailed does a prompt need to be to be complex intellectual property that describes a process? Can we consider it as code and an embodiment of a concept? Discuss. And Happy Holidays! 5 comments on Hacker News.
I decided to ask this question because of a rather contrived informal discussion I'm involved in with colleagues from both academia and industry, neither of which are lawyers but who share a few concerns about how we can go about creating new "things" and intellectual property in an increasingly AI-centric world. You can take prompts as "processes", or "embodiments" or any variation on intellectual property, but I'd love to know what people think about this--my particular concern was that if you ship your software as Open Source, could someone nitpick over your prompts and claim they were taken from their IP/software? How valid would this be given that prompts are, essentially language? How detailed does a prompt need to be to be complex intellectual property that describes a process? Can we consider it as code and an embodiment of a concept? Discuss. And Happy Holidays!
I decided to ask this question because of a rather contrived informal discussion I'm involved in with colleagues from both academia and industry, neither of which are lawyers but who share a few concerns about how we can go about creating new "things" and intellectual property in an increasingly AI-centric world. You can take prompts as "processes", or "embodiments" or any variation on intellectual property, but I'd love to know what people think about this--my particular concern was that if you ship your software as Open Source, could someone nitpick over your prompts and claim they were taken from their IP/software? How valid would this be given that prompts are, essentially language? How detailed does a prompt need to be to be complex intellectual property that describes a process? Can we consider it as code and an embodiment of a concept? Discuss. And Happy Holidays! 5 comments on Hacker News.
I decided to ask this question because of a rather contrived informal discussion I'm involved in with colleagues from both academia and industry, neither of which are lawyers but who share a few concerns about how we can go about creating new "things" and intellectual property in an increasingly AI-centric world. You can take prompts as "processes", or "embodiments" or any variation on intellectual property, but I'd love to know what people think about this--my particular concern was that if you ship your software as Open Source, could someone nitpick over your prompts and claim they were taken from their IP/software? How valid would this be given that prompts are, essentially language? How detailed does a prompt need to be to be complex intellectual property that describes a process? Can we consider it as code and an embodiment of a concept? Discuss. And Happy Holidays!
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December 23, 2025
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