Insurers Won 25 AI Patents in October and the Year Is Exactly Flat

Twenty-five granted US AI patents reached tracked insurance-sector filers in October 2026, counted by grant date from official USPTO records. That is three more than the 22 issued in October 2025 and seven fewer than September's 32. The year-to-date figure is the one to file away: January through October 2026 produced 250 grants, and January through October 2025 produced 250. The month was broader than September, with 13 filers appearing against nine, and the carrier and health sides split it evenly at nine grants each. Behind the grants, 35 AI patent applications from the same filers were published in the month, 18 of them State Farm's.

Key Takeaways

• 25 grants in October 2026 against 22 in October 2025, across four grant Tuesdays that ran 9, 9, 3 and 4.
• 250 grants in January through October 2026, exactly the count for the same ten months of 2025; the trailing twelve months to October 31 ran 287 against 295.
• 13 filers appeared in the month, up from 10 a year earlier, with UnitedHealth at 7 and State Farm at 5 taking 48% between them.
• 35 applications from tracked filers were published in October against 18 in September; State Farm filed 18 of them while its trailing-year grant count fell 16 to 60, and 30 of the 35 still await a first examiner action.
• Six grants derive property geometry, roof condition, store contents or flood severity from aerial, satellite or LIDAR capture in place of a site visit.

The Month in Grants, and a Year That Has Stopped Moving

October's 25 grants sit above the 22 the tracker recorded in October 2025 and below September's 32, a count revised up from the 31 reported in the September digest. The grant calendar was front-loaded: October 6 and October 13 carried nine each, October 20 three and October 27 four. The year-to-date comparison lands on an exact tie, 250 grants in the first ten months of 2026 and 250 in the first ten months of 2025. Over the trailing twelve months to October 31 the count is 287 against 295 in the twelve before, so the slight decline the September digest reported has narrowed and the level is best described as flat.

The month spread wider than September did. Thirteen companies recorded a grant, against nine in September and ten in October 2025. UnitedHealth and its Optum units took 7 and State Farm took 5, which together is 12 of the 25, or 48%, down from the 71% the top two held in September. Humana and EagleView took two each, and Allstate, EXL, Nearmap, USAA, Assurant, Swiss Re, Verisk, AIG and TIAA took one apiece. By category the split was nine carrier grants, nine health, five vendor, one reinsurer and one life; in October 2025 it was 12 carrier, 8 health and 2 vendor.

Pendency stayed long. The median October grant waited 1,156 days from filing, or 38 months, with the range running from 403 days for AIG's document-extraction patent to 1,982 days for Humana's contact-timing network. Three of the 25 were filed in 2025; the other 22 entered the queue in 2021 through 2024, the usual caution when reading a grant month as a signal of current build priorities.

Seven Grants From the Month

Allstate's US 12,755,321 runs machine learning over a vehicle's accident record to decide whether the crash is a total loss, the classification that routes a claim away from repair estimating and into settlement. On a total loss finding the server sets a baseline value range, derives a final value from owner-supplied information, and releases payment when the final figure falls inside the range. The range check is the control on automated payout. State Farm's US 12,769,311 goes to the pricing side. It logs vehicle, environment and autonomous-feature operating data, attaches risk levels to individual features and combines them with logged usage into a risk level for the vehicle, which then adjusts the policy, so rating can reflect measured feature usage instead of a flat assumption about the technology.

USAA's US 12,762,566 ingests real-time transaction data and finds correlations with fraud events through unsupervised learning, so new schemes can surface before a labeled set of confirmed cases exists, and a natural language layer accepts questions about fraud risk. Optum's US 12,762,436 reads historical actions and inactions taken toward resource-requesting entities together with their outcomes, estimates causal effects, and identifies the subgroups where an intervention changes the result. For a health plan allocating finite care management capacity, that separates the sickest members from the members an intervention moves.

Three grants sit on the property side. Swiss Re's US 12,762,624 processes airborne or spaceborne optical imagery into a flood extent and a flood impact figure, both weighted by the density of objects in the area the water reaches. It follows the drone-based flood vulnerability patent the reinsurer received earlier in the year. EagleView's US 12,776,021 takes a single geolocated image, generates a synthetic outline of the structure, blanks the pixels outside it, and scores the remaining roof pixels into one composite condition probability. AIG's US 12,769,949, the fastest grant in the month at 403 days, splits tables from narrative text when converting a PDF, embeds each stream as chunks, and sends only the relevant chunk type to a large language model. It extends the extraction family AIG began patenting in 2025, and a further member of that family was published as a pending application on October 1.

Movers, and 35 Applications Behind the Grants

Against the prior twelve months, UnitedHealth is up 10 to 74 and holds the leaderboard. State Farm is down 16 to 60, Allstate down 7 to 28, USAA down 4 to 19, and the carrier category as a whole is at 129 grants against 159. Health is at 94 against 74, with Humana up 7 to 11, AIG up 5 to 7, and Cotality and CVS Health up 4 each to 7 and 5. MassMutual is down 6 to 5, Liberty Mutual down 5 to 1 and Travelers down 4 to 5. Vendors as a group are at 49 against 46. The pattern the September digest described, a payer side issuing more while the property-casualty carriers issue fewer, held through October.

The theme among the grants is remote capture standing in for the site visit. Six of the 25 derive something an inspector or appraiser would otherwise record from imagery or a scan: EagleView's roof score and its sibling US 12,755,389, which builds a structure model from a segmentation heat map; Nearmap's US 12,754,565, which adjusts a flight map from coverage measured in flight; Verisk's US 12,762,795, which turns stereoscopic image pairs into a gap-free point cloud without lidar; Swiss Re's flood measure; and State Farm's US 12,775,911, which maps a store's contents from LIDAR scans. In each case the claimed subject is the intermediate, the heat map, the completed cloud, the masked image, so an actuary validating a property model that consumes those inputs is validating a step the carrier may not be able to inspect or reproduce.

The published applications run the other way from the grants. Thirty-five US AI patent applications from tracked filers were published in official USPTO records in October, against 18 in September, and State Farm filed 18 of the 35 in the same month its trailing-year grant count fell 16. Allstate filed 4, Humana 3, TIAA and Elevance 2 each, and AIG, Swiss Re, Zesty.ai, Travelers, Nearmap and Equifax one apiece; 24 of the 35 came from carriers. These are pending filings. Thirty of the 35 are docketed and awaiting a first examiner action, two have received a first rejection, one applicant has answered a first action, Humana's clinical coding pipeline stands under a final rejection, and one has been allowed. Any of them may be narrowed or refused before a patent issues. Eight of State Farm's 18 sit on the homeowners side, in water sensor placement, maintenance targeting, augmented reality inspection and flood remediation, and four more are auto claims or telematics filings.

Four stand out. State Farm's US 2026/0301080 A1 trains a network on video and voice recordings of people with known health characteristics, runs an applicant's own recordings through it with consent, and sets or adjusts life or health policy terms, premium or discount from the inference; it awaits examination on its original claim. State Farm's US 2026/0307662 A1 is the one allowed filing in the month: a generative AI tool scores real-time driving data against a safe driving threshold for each driving category and switches on the vehicle's matching autonomous control features where a category falls short, a claim the applicant narrowed after one rejection. Zesty.ai's US 2026/0311259 A1 assembles hail features, property attributes and observed damage values for properties known to have been damaged into a training set for a hail severity model; the claim names no model type and no scoring step. Elevance's US 2026/0331286 A1 reads a clinical guideline into an ordered list of criteria, builds one structured record from a member's unstructured files, and runs a generative model to return a compliant or not answer per policy, which is utilization management review. The full pending list, by filer and stage, is in the tracker's application pipeline.

Further Reading

• Insurers Won 31 AI Patents in September and UnitedHealth Took 17 – the prior monthly read, when governance machinery was the theme and health took 61% of the month.
• AIG's First AI Patent Reveals How It Processes 370,000 E&S Submissions – the extraction family that gained a further member on October 20.
• Federal Circuit Section 101 Rulings and Insurer AI Patent Moats – how much of a granted claim survives an eligibility challenge.
• Insurance AI Patents Are Narrowing in Prosecution – why a 38-month pendency produces a thinner claim than the one filed.

Sources

1. actuary.info AI Patent Watch: granted US AI patents tracked from official USPTO records, data as of October 31, 2026