Derwent Patent Search vs Minesoft PatBase: how they compare in 2026

The AI drives core features of a product that works without it. AI Search uses a language transformer model trained on the Derwent World Patents Index, launched in December 2024 across more than 160 million patent records. Other AI fills in missing bibliographic fields, resolves current ownership up to the ultimate parent, and predicts expiration date, remaining life and whether a patent is alive. Underneath is a curated database and a classic search engine, and Clarivate sells it that way: AI Search is one mode beside keyword and Boolean search across more than 300 fields, classification browsing, the citation index and Themescape maps. Without the models, customers still get invention summaries written by over 800 patent editors, family building, full text from 76 jurisdictions and litigation data from more than 140. The AI is trained on the editors' work rather than replacing it.

Most AI features date from 2025 and 2026. Document Chat answers questions about a single patent, AI Explain shows where a query overlaps a document, and Smart Images reads reference numerals in drawings. Users can also train alert classifiers, natural language queries are expanded with relevance scores, the Smart Claims viewer separates claim types, and machine translation is built in. Underneath is a platform in market since 2003 from a company founded in 1996, with a curated collection of more than 180 million publications from over 100 authorities, family level organization and daily data quality checks. Boolean, proximity, wildcard and command line searching is still sold to professional searchers. Without the models a searcher keeps the data, the family structure, the classification tools and the syntax; the AI changes who else can use it and how quickly.

AI Search returns real patent records from a closed, curated index rather than generating statements about the law, so every result is a real document with an identifier. The retrieval method is described: a language transformer model trained on the Derwent World Patents Index that takes free text such as an invention disclosure. Clarivate explains why that matters: the model learns from editors' summaries of novelty, use and advantage rather than raw patent text. What is missing is measurement. No recall or precision figure, test set or comparison with keyword or Boolean searching is published, and nothing says what the model misses. For first pass patentability and freedom to operate work, recall is the number that matters. A named customer's statement that the most relevant records now appear first is a testimonial, not a measurement.

AI Explain shows the user exactly where their input overlaps a document, highlighting the matching sections and wording, and Minesoft says the purpose is to let a searcher judge a result's relevance and see why it appeared. Relevance scores come with results, and Document Chat works on a single patent, so its answers have a bounded, visible source. No precision or recall figure is published for the AI search, no test set is described, Document Chat has no published evaluation, and no failure mode is named. Clause 11 of the agreement disclaims any warranty that the Information is accurate or complete, and says the licensor does not guarantee the accuracy of the Product or the Information or accept liability for the consequences of their use.

Users choose whether a model is involved. AI Search sits beside keyword, Boolean, advanced and classification searching, and Clarivate describes it as helping validate results and make sure relevant records are not missed, a complement rather than a replacement. No other oversight material is published. Nothing tells a searcher what to check before relying on AI Search results, no confidence signal or ranking explanation is published, and nothing describes how the model behaves outside its training. A search tool that returns ranked records does not act on its own, so unattended action is not the issue. The stakes are still real, because a missed prior art reference can decide a patentability opinion.

AI Explain lets a user see why a result surfaced, showing the overlap between query and document rather than presenting a ranking as a verdict. AI alerts can be trained in bulk from a user's own folders and search history, so the classifier deciding what reaches them is tuned by their own past judgments. Relevance scores let a searcher decide where to stop. No threshold is stated at which any feature acts without review, and nothing separates AI assisted from conventional operation although both are available. Nothing describes what happens when a Document Chat answer is wrong, and there is no published route for correcting or reporting an output. No statement says the tools support rather than replace professional judgment.

Clarivate says 40 patent and trademark offices, the bodies that examine patentability for a living, use the platform and its index. In the launch release, Susan Johnson, patent agent and IP researcher at Boston Scientific, says other tools made her review 50 to 200 results to find the most relevant, while AI Search puts them at the top. Neither claim is dated, the comparison has no method, and the 40 offices are counted, not named.

Minesoft says more than 90,000 innovators and legal professionals use the platform, that it has served patent professionals since 1996, and that PatBase launched in 2003. The data covers more than 180 million publications across over 100 authorities, support is offered in fifteen or more languages across all time zones, and a public status page is maintained. The product and feature pages name no customer, the navigation has no case study section, no testimonial is attributed to a named person or organization, and no figure is published for time saved, recall improved or cost reduced by any AI feature. Feature announcements describe benefits such as speed and less noise without measurement. A company registration number is published, which identifies the company rather than the product.

Confidentiality is stated in general corporate terms, and the question this product raises goes unanswered. The privacy policy says Clarivate acts as processor for data customers enter, under separate data processing agreements, and that staff and providers are bound by confidentiality. The Clarivate Terms protect each party's confidential information. But AI Search invites an invention disclosure, which is unpublished, destroys novelty if it leaks, and is often privileged. Nothing says whether a search is stored, for how long, whether it is tied to a user, used to improve the model, or visible to Clarivate staff. Privilege, work product, model provider terms and retention are not addressed.

The product pages say customer data is never used to train models, that searches and results belong to the customer, and that the platform is a private cloud storing data securely under data protection law. In the agreement, clause 19 sets a mutual confidentiality duty lasting five years after termination and limits use of the other party's confidential information to performing the agreement. It also requires notice before any legally compelled disclosure where the law allows. Clause 20 commits both parties to the UK Data Protection Act 2018 and the GDPR, and clause 4 lets the customer keep an archive copy of retrieved information for twelve months after termination. Privilege and work product are not named. No model provider is identified for the generative features. No retention or deletion position covers the customer's own searches, queries or Document Chat exchanges.

The Clarivate Terms carry a standard disclaimer while the marketing speaks of professional decisions. The terms disclaim all unstated warranties, including accuracy, completeness and currentness, the properties a prior art searcher relies on. The marketing promises reliable innovation decisions, accurate first pass patentability searches, input to freedom to operate opinions and confident patentability assessments, which are legal work product. The audience is clear: patent researchers, patent attorneys and other IP and R&D professionals, so people who are not lawyers are intended users. Nothing says where the tool's output stops and professional judgment begins, nothing covers supervision, competence or an R&D user relying on a result without counsel, and no jurisdiction or professional rule is named.

Clause 11 supplies the Product and Information as is, disclaims any warranty that the Information is accurate or complete, and says the licensor does not guarantee accuracy or accept liability for the consequences of use. Clause 10 adds that features relying on patent office services are outside the licensor's control and that it takes no responsibility for retrieving Information. The product is marketed for freedom to operate analysis, patent due diligence and invalidity screening, all of which produce legal conclusions, to legal teams, IP experts, professional searchers and R&D teams together. Nothing addresses where the tool stops and professional judgment begins, supervision or competence, or any rule of professional conduct, and nothing covers an R&D user acting on a Document Chat answer about claim scope without counsel.

Clarivate describes AI governance as work in progress. At company level it reports committees drawn from several functions working on an AI Governance Framework and guiding business leaders as generative AI enters products. Nothing ties that framework to this product. No responsible AI page, accountable owner for model behavior, testing before release or evaluation result is published, and bias is not addressed. That matters because AI Search learns from an index written by human editors, so any lean in that editorial work toward certain technologies, jurisdictions or drafting styles would carry into what the model finds.

Customer data is never used to train models, processing takes place in a private cloud on UK servers, and the data centers are said to meet ISO 27001. AI Explain is presented as a transparency feature, and the autumn 2025 release grouped changes around transparency. The site has a dedicated AI section, and no AI policy or responsible AI page appears in the site navigation. Outside that section, no framework is cited, no person or body is named as accountable for model behavior, no testing before release is described and no evaluation result is published. Bias is not addressed. The alert classifier learns from a user's own past selections, and nothing published addresses the narrowing that can cause.

Clarivate publishes a corporate security program and nothing about what happens to what users type in. Its Information Security Program page says its management system is based on ISO/IEC 27001, with documented policies, standards and controls and an in house security team. A public Trust Center covers security, privacy and compliance, and an incident response process is described: identify, investigate, contain and correct. For this product there is no retention period for searches, no deletion commitment, no statement on whether AI Search inputs are logged or reused, no subprocessor list, and no description of access controls in the product. That matters because the input is often an invention disclosure. Detailed certification and testing material on the Clarivate site belongs to Ex Libris, a separate business unit, and Clarivate's Trust Center says certifications may vary by product.

Customer data is never used to train models, searches and results belong to the customer, and information is stored securely and privately in a private cloud on UK servers. The data centers are said to meet ISO 27001. Clause 6 of the agreement makes the customer responsible for the security of its User IDs and requires immediate notice of unauthorized use, with an audit right for the licensor on seven days' notice. Clause 19 carries a five year confidentiality tail, and clause 20 commits to the UK Data Protection Act 2018 and the GDPR. A public status page shows availability. No subprocessor list is published; RWS is named only as a translation development partner, not as a processor of customer data. No retention period or deletion commitment covers searches, queries or Document Chat exchanges. No breach notification commitment to customers is published, and the agreement puts the notification duty on the customer only.

Under Clarivate's terms, stated warranties, plus any in the order, are the only warranties. For software, if a valid warranty claim cannot be fixed in a reasonable time, the customer may cancel and get a refund based on five year straight line depreciation from the order date. For services, Clarivate will rectify on written notice. Each party's total liability, and that of Clarivate's providers, is capped at direct damages up to twelve months of fees for the product concerned. Lost profits, data and other indirect losses are excluded on both sides. The terms disclaim accuracy, completeness and currentness, which are what a prior art search rests on, and no AI provision, vendor indemnity or insurance position is published.

The agreement can be downloaded in full without a login. Clause 11 warrants that the Product will operate materially in line with its description or technical specification, before disclaiming all other warranties. Liability is capped at the license fee paid in the preceding twelve months, with the usual exclusions for lost profits, revenue or business and for indirect, consequential, special, punitive or exemplary loss. Clause 13 requires the licensor to indemnify the customer against claims that the Product infringes a third party's intellectual property, subject to notice, control of the defense and no admissions, with a matching customer indemnity for use of the Product. Termination is for material breach with fourteen days to remedy, under English law and courts. Nothing addresses the accuracy of a generated answer or risk from a decision based on one, and no insurance position is published.

Integration is described mostly in the contract. The Clarivate Terms say licensed data may be delivered by API or data feed, and that APIs may let hosted or installed software be configured or work with third party programs, with keys that may not be shared or used to copy Clarivate features. Within the product, the index and citation data are joined with full text, machine translation for China, Korea and Japan, and litigation data from Darts-ip. No connector catalog or developer documentation is published, no direction of data flow is described, and no outside system is named as supported, though customers usually also run an IP management or docketing system.

A Patent Data API is sold as its own product line, and Minesoft publishes separate API and MCP pages. The site lists an MCP entry among its AI applications and advertises an early access program for an agentic tool. Within the suite, PatBase sits alongside Minesoft Origin, PatDocs and ChemX, and analytics output, including charts, heat maps and clusters, can be exported and shared. No connector catalog is published, no outside system is named as supported, and nothing describes how results would reach a docketing or IP management system.

Derwent Patent Search is a hosted browser application licensed by subscription, and the Clarivate Terms cover both hosted and installed software. Nothing states the data center region, country of processing or a regional choice for this product, or whether saved searches, alerts and work files sit in a shared or isolated environment. No single tenant, private or on premises option is offered or ruled out. Detailed residency material on the Clarivate site covering the United States, Europe and Asia Pacific belongs to Ex Libris, a separate business unit, and Clarivate's Trust Center says certifications and reports may vary by product and refers questions to an account representative.

Minesoft states repeatedly that its servers are in the United Kingdom, offered as a reason customer data is secure. The platform is described as a private cloud in which a customer's searches and results are its own, and the 2020 rebuild as a cloud move led by RWS for resilience and security. Data centers are said to meet ISO 27001. No deployment options are offered or refused, so nothing says whether single tenant, private or on premise arrangements are available, and no other region is offered. Nothing explains how customers are kept separate in the private cloud, and no data center operator is named.

Clarivate says at company level that its security management system is based on ISO/IEC 27001, with documented controls, and that its program aligns with ISO 27001 and SOC 2. A public Trust Center covers security, privacy and compliance. It says certifications and reports may vary by product and refers questions to an account representative, so the public record does not show whether Derwent Patent Search is in scope. No report, certificate, audit period or auditor is available without that conversation. The ISO 22301, 27001, 27017, 27018, 27032 and 27701 certifications detailed on the Clarivate site belong to Ex Libris.

The disclosure is one sentence: Minesoft's security commitment is backed by ISO 27001 certification, ensuring its data centers meet international information security standards. Read strictly, that attaches the certification to the data centers rather than to Minesoft's own security management system, and nothing says which is meant. No certificate number, certification body, issue or expiry date, scope statement or route to obtain the certificate or a report is published, and there is no trust center or security documentation page. The published practices are the private cloud, the UK server location, and the User ID security and audit terms in clause 6 of the agreement.

Clarivate describes the AI design and names no provider. AI Search uses a language transformer model, also called a large language AI model, trained and powered by the Derwent World Patents Index, Clarivate's own editorially curated index. Clarivate markets it as the only AI patent search trained on that data. Naming the training corpus, and owning it, is a strong disclosure. No model, version or provider is named, nothing says whether the model was built in house or licensed and fine tuned, nothing says where it runs, and no notice of changes is promised. The same goes for the AI behind data enrichment, ownership resolution and legal status prediction.

Seven AI features are named: Document Chat, AI Explain, Smart Images, the trainable alert classifier, natural language query expansion with relevance scores, the Smart Claims viewer and machine translation. No model, version or architecture is given beyond references to image recognition and claim recognition, and no provider is named for the generative feature, Document Chat, where a third party foundation model would usually sit. Nothing says where inference runs relative to the UK servers, what any provider keeps of a Document Chat question, or whether customers would be told of a model change, and clause 10 of the agreement reserves the right to change the Product and its features without notice. RWS, which develops the platform with Minesoft, provides machine translation and is said to be improving it continuously; that disclosure covers translation only.

No pricing is published at any level, not even the unit of charge. There is no pricing page; the product page offers only a free trial request, and the wider site leads to contact and demo requests. Nothing says whether the subscription is priced per named user, per seat, per module, by search volume or by coverage, or what AI Search costs on top of the base platform. The Clarivate Terms put fees in an order form and treat pricing and discounts as confidential information the customer may not disclose. A third party listing also says no pricing is published.

The agreement publishes the unit and structure of charging. Licensing is per User ID, and extra User IDs can be added on written request, ending with the existing term and charged pro rata from the month added. The term is twelve months unless the Product Terms say otherwise, renewing automatically for one year periods unless either party gives thirty days' written notice. Invoicing is annual in advance. Late payment carries interest at eight percent above the Bank of England base rate plus collection costs, and the licensor may suspend access without notice while payment is outstanding. Clause 17 says Product Terms prevail over the general Terms in a conflict, so the commercial specifics live there. No price, band, minimum or range is published, and the only route is a demonstration request.

Coverage is stated with precise figures, each scoped separately. The Derwent World Patents Index covers 60 jurisdictions and 132 million patents. Enhanced full text covers 76 jurisdictions and bibliographic data 109, more than 178 million publications in all, and litigation data covers more than 140 jurisdictions. Machine translation covers major authorities including China, Korea and Japan, and the interface runs in Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean. Users are named as patent researchers, patent attorneys and other IP and R&D professionals, and 40 patent and trademark offices use it. Use cases include patentability, freedom to operate, invalidity, prosecution, portfolio monitoring, licensing and litigation support. The limits are missing. No technology area is named as weaker, the 41 new index codes for emerging areas suggest the taxonomy trails new fields without saying by how much, and nothing separates this product's coverage from Derwent Patent Monitor.

Minesoft cites more than 180 million publications from over 100 issuing authorities, full text for the major jurisdictions, family and publication level organization, and a live feed with daily quality checks. Machine translation, often available the same day as a new document, covers languages for cross border prior art. A spring 2026 release added fourteen standards bodies for standard essential patent work by name, IEEE, ISO, CCSA, OMA, IMT, OneM2M, TIA, ATIS, ITU-T, ITU-R, IEC, IETF, ANSI and TTA, with dedicated search syntax. Named use cases span search, monitoring, collaboration, due diligence, freedom to operate, competitor intelligence and technology landscaping. They are aimed at IP experts, legal teams, R&D teams and professional searchers, with support in fifteen or more languages. No jurisdiction is identified as thinly covered, no technology area as better or worse served, and no coverage dates or backfile depth are given.