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Minesoft PatBase

The models are the engine of several named capabilities layered on a platform that functions fully without them, which is the B band. The AI additions are real and recent, arriving mostly across 2025 and 2026: Document Chat for generated answers about an individual patent, AI Explain for showing where a query overlaps a document, Smart Images for reading reference numerals out of patent drawings, AI-trainable alert classifiers, natural-language query expansion with relevance scores, the Smart Claims viewer distinguishing independent from dependent claims, and machine translation embedded across search and review.

Underneath sits a platform whose independent existence is not in doubt and is in fact the vendor's oldest claim on its buyers. PatBase has been in market since 2003 on a company founded in 1996, and its core is a curated corpus of more than 180 million publications from over 100 authorities with family-level organisation, daily data quality checking, and Boolean, proximity, wildcard and command-line searching that the vendor still markets to professional searchers as a primary mode.

Strip out every model and a searcher retains the corpus, the family structure, the classification tools and the syntax. What the AI changes is who else can use it and how quickly, which is the B band exactly. Verified 13 September 2026.

Grounding is real and documented at an unusual level of granularity, with no measured accuracy published, which is the B band. The grounding mechanism is a named feature rather than an architectural assertion. AI Explain shows the user precisely where and how their input overlaps a document's content, highlighting the specific sections and wording that matched, and the vendor states the purpose plainly: so a searcher can immediately judge how relevant a result is and understand why it appeared.

That is passage-level attribution on a retrieval result, which is more than most records in this lane offer. Relevance scores accompany results, giving a ranked signal a user can act on, and Document Chat operates against a single patent so its answers have a bounded and visible source document. What is absent is measurement of the vendor's own accuracy. No precision or recall figure is published for the AI search, no test set is described, no evaluation of Document Chat is offered, and no failure mode is named.

The agreement runs the other way and is worth recording because it is contractual rather than promotional: clause 11 disclaims any warranty that the Information is accurate or complete, and states that the licensor does not guarantee the accuracy of the Product or the Information or accept liability for the consequences of their use. Verified 13 September 2026.

Real user control over how the models behave, with review surfaces, short of the full control structure, which is the B band. Two published capabilities go beyond assurance to actual control. AI Explain lets a user interrogate why a result surfaced, exposing the overlap between query and document rather than presenting a ranking as a verdict. And AI alerts can be bulk-trained by the user from their own folders and search history, so the classifier that decides what reaches them is tuned by their own prior judgements rather than by the vendor alone.

That is user authority over model behaviour, which is rarer in this corpus than statements about human oversight. Relevance scores give a graded signal instead of a binary inclusion, letting a searcher decide where to stop. What the A band asks for is not published. No threshold is stated at which any capability acts without review, no mode distinction separates AI-assisted from conventional operation despite both being available, nothing describes what happens when a Document Chat answer is wrong, and no route is published for correcting or reporting an output.

Nor is there any general statement that the tools support rather than replace professional judgement, which several comparable vendors do make. The controls here are practical rather than declared, and the note records that as the shape of the record. Verified 13 September 2026.

Scale and longevity are published without a single named customer or measured outcome, which is the C band. What exists is substantial as scale evidence. The vendor states more than 90,000 innovators and legal professionals use the platform, that it has been helping patent professionals since 1996, and that PatBase itself launched in 2003, so the operating history is long and stated. Corpus scale is quantified at more than 180 million publications across over 100 authorities.

Support reach is described concretely at 15 or more languages across all time zones. A public product status page is maintained, which is a small but real piece of operational transparency few vendors in this lane offer. None of that is deployment evidence in the sense this axis tests. No customer is named anywhere on the surfaces read, no case study or customer story section appears in the navigation, no testimonial is attributed to a named individual or organisation, and no figure is published for time saved, recall improved or cost reduced by any of the AI capabilities.

The feature announcements describe benefits in the abstract, saying that a capability is faster or produces less noise, without measurement. The one third-party attested marker located, a corporate identity and registration number, evidences the company rather than the product. Verified 13 September 2026.

Substantive published commitments, several of them contractual, defeated on the limbs the A band names, which is the B band. The commitments are unusually direct for a vendor of this size and they come from two independent places. On the product surfaces: customer data is never used to train models, searches and results are stated to belong to the customer, and the platform is described as a private cloud with data stored securely and privately in compliance with data protection law.

In the published agreement: clause 19 imposes a mutual confidentiality obligation surviving five years beyond termination, restricts use of the other party's confidential information to performance of the agreement, and requires notice before any legally compelled disclosure so far as the law permits, which is graded on its own signal. Clause 20 commits both parties to the UK Data Protection Act 2018 and the GDPR. Clause 4 gives the customer a right to retain an archive copy of retrieved information for twelve months after termination.

Three limbs fail. Privilege and work product are not addressed by name, which under R33 forecloses A on its own. No model provider is identified for the generative features. And no retention or deletion position is published for the customer's own searches, queries or Document Chat exchanges, which is the material a competitor would most want. Verified 13 September 2026.

A contractual disclaimer sits in the terms while the marketing describes the product in decision terms and the audience reaches beyond lawyers, which is the C band. The disclaimer is real and is contractual rather than a website footer: clause 11 provides the Product and the Information are supplied as is, disclaims any warranty that the Information is accurate or complete, and states the licensor does not guarantee accuracy or accept liability for the consequences of use.

Clause 10 adds that features dependent on public patent office services are outside the licensor's control and no responsibility is taken for the successful retrieval of Information, which is a pointed disclaimer on a prior art tool. Against that the product is marketed for freedom-to-operate analysis, patent due diligence and invalidity screening, all of which produce legal conclusions, and the vendor addresses legal teams, IP experts, professional searchers and R&D teams together, so non-lawyers are expressly among the intended users.

Nothing published bridges the two. No statement addresses where the tool's output stops and professional judgement begins, no supervision or competence dimension is offered, no rule of professional conduct or bar authority is named in any jurisdiction, and nothing addresses an R&D user acting on a Document Chat answer about claim scope without counsel. Verified 13 September 2026.

Individual AI commitments are published without any governing framework behind them, which is the C band. What exists is a set of true and useful statements rather than a programme. Customer data is never used to train models. Processing takes place in a private cloud on UK-based servers. Data centres are said to meet ISO 27001. AI Explain is presented explicitly as a transparency feature, and the autumn 2025 release framed a group of changes around enhancing transparency, so the vendor does think about explainability as a design goal and ships features that serve it.

Beyond that the governance layer is absent. No AI policy or responsible-AI page was located in the site navigation, and the dedicated AI section of the estate was not read and is named under R25 as the surface most likely to change this grade. No framework is adopted or cited, no individual, committee or function is named as accountable for model behaviour, no pre-release testing regime is described and no evaluation result is published.

Bias is not addressed in any form, which is worth naming on this product specifically because the alert classifier is trained on an individual user's own prior selections, a design that by construction reinforces what that user has already chosen to look at, and nothing published addresses the narrowing that invites. Verified 13 September 2026.

Substantive published policy across most limbs, short of the full set, which is the B band. The data position is stated plainly and repeatedly across the product estate: customer data is never used to train models, searches and results belong to the customer, information is stored securely and privately within a private cloud, and servers are located in the United Kingdom. Security certification is claimed against ISO 27001 for the data centres, and the agreement adds obligations on both sides, clause 6 making the customer responsible for the security of issued User IDs and requiring immediate notification of any unauthorised usage, with a reciprocal 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 product status page is maintained, giving customers visibility of availability without asking. Three limbs fail. No subprocessor list is published, and the one third party identified anywhere, RWS as machine translation partner, is named in a development context rather than as a processor of customer data.

No retention period or deletion commitment is published for searches, queries or Document Chat exchanges. And no incident or breach notification commitment to customers was located, the agreement placing the notification duty on the customer and not reciprocating. Verified 13 September 2026.

A published agreement addressing every commercial limb the axis tests, short of anything AI-specific, which is the B band and the strongest liability position in this lane. The agreement is published in full as a downloadable document, ungated, and it is short enough to read, which by itself distinguishes it from the three comparators in this lane whose terms could not be recovered at all. An express warranty exists and is not swallowed by the disclaimer that follows it: clause 11 warrants that the Product will operate materially in accordance with its description or technical specification, before disclaiming all other warranties.

Liability is capped at the licence fee paid in the preceding twelve months, with the usual exclusions for loss of profits, revenue or business and for indirect, consequential, special, punitive or exemplary loss. And a vendor indemnity is given rather than withheld: clause 13 requires the licensor to indemnify the customer against all claims, damages and expenses arising from a claim that the Product infringes a third party's intellectual property rights, subject only to notice, control of defence and no-admissions conditions, with a reciprocal customer indemnity for use of the Product.

Termination runs on material breach with fourteen days to remedy, and English law and courts govern. What is absent is any AI provision at all. Nothing addresses the accuracy of a generated answer, nothing allocates risk for a decision taken on one, and no insurance position is published. Verified 13 September 2026.

Integration surfaces are named as products without documentation or a named external system, which is the C band. What is established is that routes out of the platform exist and are sold as such. A Patent Data API is published as a product line in its own right, so programmatic access is offered rather than merely implied. The estate lists an MCP entry among its AI applications, which if shipped would let a customer's own assistant call the platform, and under ground rules section 3 that is extensibility rather than model choice; it is recorded here and expressly not credited, because the page was not read and the estate simultaneously advertises an early-access programme for an agentic tool, so whether MCP is generally available or part of that programme is unresolved.

Within the suite, PatBase sits alongside Minesoft Origin, PatDocs and ChemX, and analytics output including charts, diagrams, heat maps and clusters can be exported and shared. What the higher bands require was not established. No connector catalogue is published, not one external system is named as supported, no API documentation was reached, and nothing describes how results or portfolio data would reach a docketing or IP management system. Under R25 the API and MCP pages are named as what would move this row. Verified 13 September 2026.

Both co-equal limbs are addressed at least in outline, which under R38 places this comfortably in the B band and above most of its lane. Region is stated first-party and repeated across the estate: the servers are based in the United Kingdom, offered as a reason a customer's data is secure. For a European buyer with residency obligations that is a direct answer, and for a buyer needing United States or Asian residency it is an equally clear one in the other direction, which is the point of the axis.

Tenancy is addressed in substance if not in architectural terms: the platform is described as a private cloud, with a customer's searches and results characterised as their own and held within it, and the 2020 platform rebuild is described as a cloud implementation led by RWS aimed at resilience and security. Data centres are stated to meet ISO 27001. What is not published keeps it off A. No deployment options are offered or refused, so nothing states whether a single-tenant, private or on-premises arrangement is available to an enterprise that needs one, and no alternative region is offered for customers who cannot use United Kingdom hosting.

The private cloud description states an outcome rather than an architecture, and nothing sets out how separation between customers is achieved or assured. No data centre operator is named. Verified 13 September 2026.

A standard is named and the claim is made in terms that leave its subject unclear, with no scope, date or evidence, which is the C band. The sentence is the whole of the disclosure and it repays close reading: the vendor's commitment to security is said to be backed by ISO 27001 certification, ensuring that its data centres adhere to international information security standards. Read strictly, the certification is attached to the data centres rather than to Minesoft's own information security management system, which raises the question ground rules section 3 exists for, since a hosting provider's certification is infrastructure and does not attest to the vendor's own controls.

Nothing published resolves which is meant. Beyond that ambiguity, none of the supporting material a buyer would use is present: no certificate number, no certification body, no issue or expiry date, no statement of the scope covered, and no route to obtain the certificate or any report. No trust centre or security documentation page exists in the site navigation. What sits alongside is real but is practice rather than attestation, being the private cloud description, the United Kingdom server location, and the User ID security and audit provisions of clause 6 of the agreement.

The distance to a better grade is small and entirely within the vendor's control, which the note records because it is the honest reading. Verified 13 September 2026.

The vendor describes AI capabilities by function without identifying what performs them, which is the C band. Seven distinct AI features are named and described: Document Chat, AI Explain, Smart Images, the trainable alert classifier, natural-language query expansion with relevance scoring, the Smart Claims viewer and machine translation. For each, what it does is clear and how it is built is not. No model is named, no version is given, no architecture is described beyond references to AI-based image recognition and AI-enabled claim recognition, and no provider is identified for the generative component, which matters most on Document Chat because generated answers about a patent are where a third-party foundation model would ordinarily sit.

Nothing states where inference runs relative to the United Kingdom servers the vendor otherwise emphasises, what any provider retains of a question put to Document Chat, or whether a customer would be told if an underlying model changed. Clause 10 of the agreement runs the other way, reserving the right to change or modify the Product and its features without notice. One third party is named and is credited here as far as it goes: RWS, the translation company that co-develops the platform, is identified as the machine translation partner and is said to be continuously improving translation quality.

That is a named supplier performing a named function, which is real disclosure, and it covers translation only. Verified 13 September 2026.

The unit and structure of charging are published in the agreement while no figure appears anywhere, which is the C band and lifts this off the floor. The published terms set out the commercial mechanics with precision, and a buyer can establish the shape of the deal before speaking to anyone. Licensing is per User ID, with additional User IDs added on written request, co-terminous with the existing term and charged pro rata by the month in which they are added.

The term is twelve months unless the Product Terms say otherwise, renewing automatically for further one-year periods unless either party gives thirty days' written notice. Invoicing is annual in advance. Late payment attracts interest at eight per cent above the Bank of England base rate together with collection costs, and the licensor may suspend access without notice while payment is outstanding. Clause 17 provides that Product Terms prevail over the general Terms in a conflict, so a buyer knows where the commercial specifics will live.

What is absent is any number. No price, band, minimum or indicative range appears on the estate, and the only route published is a demonstration request. Under R17 the test is mechanical: this evidence lifts the axis above D, so a VendorPricing row is owed, written with entryPriceUsd null under R10. Verified 13 September 2026.

Coverage is described with real substance across data, jurisdictions and workflows, with the boundaries left open, which is the B band. Corpus coverage is quantified at more than 180 million publications from over 100 issuing authorities, with full-text coverage of the major jurisdictions, family-level and publication-level organisation and a live feed of new documents subject to daily quality checking. Language coverage is addressed through machine translation embedded in search and review, often available the same day as a new document, which for cross-border prior art is coverage in the operative sense.

One area is covered in unusual and recent detail: standard-essential patent work, where a spring 2026 release added fourteen standard-setting organisations by name, being IEEE, ISO, CCSA, OMA, IMT, OneM2M, TIA, ATIS, ITU-T, ITU-R, IEC, IETF, ANSI and TTA, with dedicated search syntax and new source and company columns. Workflow coverage is published as named use cases across search, monitoring, collaboration, due diligence, freedom to operate, competitor intelligence and technology landscaping, and buyer coverage names IP experts, legal teams, R&D teams and professional searchers, supported in fifteen or more languages.

What is left open is every limit. No jurisdiction is identified as thinly covered among the hundred, no technology area is named as better or worse served, and nothing states coverage dates or backfile depth. Verified 13 September 2026.