alterlab-uspto

alterlab-uspto is a skill for Claude Code from AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills. It costs 73 tokens per session (2,683 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An interface to United States Patent and Trademark Office databases and APIs. It retrieves patent, trademark, ownership, examination, citation, and legal-status records.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for patent and trademark searches, prior-art research, patent prosecution history, office actions, assignments, citations, status checks, and portfolio analysis.
Why use it?
It replaces manual searches across several intellectual-property record systems with programmatic access. This makes it easier to investigate inventions, brands, ownership changes, and examination history.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the alterlab-databases plugin — 39 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it for patent and trademark searches, prior-art research, patent prosecution history, office actions, assignments, citations, status checks, and portfolio analysis.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-uspto
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills --skill alterlab-uspto
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install alterlab-databases, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 39 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for alterlab-uspto

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-uspto/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-uspto)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-uspto"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-uspto/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for alterlab-uspto

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-uspto"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-uspto.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 73 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,683 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Data Exfiltration · line 255
    Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
  • medium Data Exfiltration · line 257
    Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00073 $0.02683
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.01341
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00537
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00268

Measured 7d ago against content hash 6c5ce7f5c752, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

alterlab-uspto scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 3 executable files (scripts/patent_search.py, scripts/peds_client.py, scripts/trademark_client.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

allowed-tools: Read WebFetch Bash(curl:*) Bash(python:*)
skills/databases/alterlab-uspto/SKILL.md · 276 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 276 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

USPTO Database

Overview

USPTO provides specialized APIs for patent and trademark data. Search patents by keywords/inventors/assignees, retrieve examination history via PEDS, track assignments, analyze citations and office actions, access TSDR for trademarks, for IP analysis and prior art searches.

When to Use This Skill

This skill should be used when:

  • Patent Search: Finding patents by keywords, inventors, assignees, classifications, or dates
  • Patent Details: Retrieving full patent data including claims, abstracts, citations
  • Trademark Search: Looking up trademarks by serial or registration number
  • Trademark Status: Checking trademark status, ownership, and prosecution history
  • Examination History: Accessing patent prosecution data from PEDS (Patent Examination Data System)
  • Office Actions: Retrieving office action text, citations, and rejections
  • Assignments: Tracking patent/trademark ownership transfers
  • Citations: Analyzing patent citations (forward and backward)
  • Litigation: Accessing patent litigation records
  • Portfolio Analysis: Analyzing patent/trademark portfolios for companies or inventors

USPTO API Ecosystem

The USPTO provides multiple specialized APIs for different data needs:

Core APIs

  1. PatentSearch API - Modern ElasticSearch-based patent search (replaced legacy PatentsView in May 2025)

    • Search patents by keywords, inventors, assignees, classifications, dates
    • Access to patent data through June 30, 2025
    • 45 requests/minute rate limit
    • Base URL: https://search.patentsview.org/api/v1/
  2. PEDS (Patent Examination Data System) - Patent examination history

    • Application status and transaction history from 1981-present
    • Office action dates and examination events
    • Use uspto-opendata-python Python library
    • Replaced: PAIR Bulk Data (PBD) - decommissioned
  3. TSDR (Trademark Status & Document Retrieval) - Trademark data

    • Trademark status, ownership, prosecution history
    • Search by serial or registration number
    • Base URL: https://tsdrapi.uspto.gov/ts/cd/

Read the full file on GitHub · 276 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 7d ago First seen · 276 lines · 73 tokens per session scan A 6c5ce7f5c752

Subscribe to this mod's changes

alterlab-uspto is a skill published in the GitHub repository AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills (66 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 73 tokens to every session and 2,683 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-05.

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