Last year, 95 secrecy orders barring disclosure of inventions under the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951 were imposed on new patent applications while 36 prior secrecy orders were rescinded. Three of the newly releasable inventions have recently received patents, decades after the inventors filed their applications.
The three new patents were identified by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
The formerly secret inventions that received patents this year are:
Patent Number 9057604: Point-ahead laser pointer-tracker systems with wavefront correction in both transmit and receive directions. Filed in April 1989, the patent application was finally granted in June 2015.
Patent Number 9115993: Fused PM fiber single-polarization resonator. It was filed in August 1990 and granted in August 2015.
Patent Number 9181140: Solid propellant bonding agents and methods for their use. It was filed in December 1993 and granted in November 2015.
The factors that led the U.S. government to impose secrecy orders on these particular inventions more than two decades ago (and to release them this year) are not self-evident. But neither do they seem to indicate an obvious abuse of authority.
There were a total of 5,579 invention secrecy orders in effect at the end of fiscal year 2015, the highest number of such secrecy orders since FY 1993.
Protecting the health and safety of the American public and ensuring that the public has the opportunity to participate in the federal decision-making process is crucial. As currently organized, FACs are not equipped to provide the best evidence-based advice.
As new waves of AI technologies continue to enter the public sector, touching a breadth of services critical to the welfare of the American people, this center of excellence will help maintain high standards for responsible public sector AI for decades to come.
The Federation of American Scientists supports the Critical Materials Future Act and the Unearth Innovation Act.
By creating a reliable, user-friendly framework for surfacing provenance, NIST would empower readers to better discern the trustworthiness of the text they encounter, thereby helping to counteract the risks posed by deceptive AI-generated content.