EU Policy Watch

Europe’s Fragile Lead in AI Patents: Growth Reversal and Structural Divergence

Data from the European Patent Office’s 2025 Technology Dashboard show that computer technology remains the largest field for EPO patent applications, growing 6.1%, with AI growing 9.5% and quantum computing growing 37.9%. Europe remains ahead in the total number of AI and quantum computing patents, but the growth rate of U.S. AI patent applications reached 26.4%, far exceeding Europe’s 2.6%. This article argues that this growth-rate gap reveals structural challenges in Europe’s innovation system: it continues to lag behind the United States in AI subfields with the clearest commercialization prospects, such as machine learning, maintaining an advantage only in a few areas such as image and video recognition. Europe’s lead in quantum computing is likewise under pressure from the United States’ accelerating catch-up. AI’s energy constraints are reshaping the direction of innovation, and if Europe can deeply integrate AI with clean energy and energy-efficiency technologies, it may establish differentiated competitive advantages in cross-disciplinary fields.