Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claims 1-21 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter. The claim(s) does/do not fall within at least one of the four categories of patent eligible subject matter because the claimed computer storage media encoded with the program instructions includes propagated signal.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claims 1-11, 13-14 and 16-23 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to abstract idea without significantly more. Claims 1, reciting the steps of “receiving a message a) for an external system and b) that comprises two or more phrases”; “ determining a context of the phrase in the message”; and “determining, using the context, whether modification of the phrase will likely maintain an intent of the message”; “determining whether to permit unedited transmission of the message to the external system using a result of at least one of one or more determinations whether modification of the phrase will likely maintain the intent of the message”; and “performing one or more actions using a result of the determination whether to permit unedited transmission of the message to the external system.”, are directed to describing a series of mental processes. In that regard each of the cited steps comprising receiving of a message, determining whether modification of the message is performed and acting based on the determination, are actions that can be practically performed in a human mind or by a person using a pencil and paper or a general-purpose computer.
This judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application because the claim fails to integrate the mental process into a practical application that provides a real technological improvement by tying it to a specific hardware/software.
The claim(s) does/do not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception because the claim does not include any limitation or element other than those found to be abstract idea.
Claims 22 and 23 are analogous to claim 1, therefore rejected for the reason set forth for claim 1.
Claims 2-11, 13-14 and 16-21 do not include any limitation or element that amount to significantly more than the abstract idea.
Examiner’s Note
Examiner has cited particular columns and line numbers or figures in the references as applied to the claims below for the convenience of the applicant. Although the specified citations are representative of the teachings in the art and are applied to the specific limitations within the individual claim, other passages and figures may apply as well. It is respectfully requested from the applicant, in preparing the responses, to fully consider the references in entirety as potentially teaching all or part of the claimed invention, as well as the context of the passage as taught by the prior art or disclosed by the examiner.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claim(s) 1, 2, 5-7, 9-14, 16-18 and 21-23 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Gu et al. (US 12,556,533).
As to claim 1, Gu teaches One or more computer storage media encoded with instructions that, when executed by one or more computers, cause the one or more computers to perform operations comprising: receiving a prompt/message 404 a) for an external system and b) that comprises two or more phrases; for at least one phrase from the two or more phrases: determining a context (sensitive/private information) of the phrase in the message (Fig.3, 302, Col.8, lines 51-67); and determining, using the context, whether modification/revision/redaction (410) of the phrase will likely maintain an intent of the message (406, 408 Col.9, line 57-Col.10, line 12); determining whether to permit unedited transmission of the message to the external system using a result of at least one of one or more determinations whether modification of the phrase will likely maintain the intent of the message (an element of private information may be removable from a prompt if the quality of an LLM response would not be affected by submitting the prompt to an LLM without the private information. If it is determined that no element of private information can be removed from the original prompt, the method 400 may proceed to action 412); and performing one or more actions ((20) In some embodiments, determining that the at least one element of private information can be removed from the original prompt may be based on an analysis of whether removal of the at least one element of private information will impact a response to the original prompt) using a result of the determination whether to permit unedited transmission of the message to the external system (Figs.1, 3-4; Col.2, lines 34-53; Col.3, lines 10-34, Col.6, lines 25-63).
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As to claim 2, Gu teaches wherein: determining whether to permit unedited transmission of the message to the external system comprises determining whether to generate a second/revised message 410 for the external system using a result of at least one of one or more determinations whether modification of the phrase will likely maintain the intent of the message; and performing one or more actions uses a result of the determination whether to generate the second message for the external system (Figs.4A-4B).
As to claim 5, Gomez teaches the operations comprising: determining, for a phrase from the two or more phrases and using the context, that modification of the phrase will likely maintain an intent of the message; generating the second/modified message by replacing one or more instances of the phrase with a replacement phrase; updating the response by replacing/deanonymizing instances of the replacement phrase with the phrase; and providing instructions that cause presentation of the response that includes the phrase instead of the replacement phrase (Fig.4).
As to claim 6, Gu teaches wherein determining whether modification of the phrase will likely maintain the intent of the message comprises determining, using the context, whether modification of the phrase will likely maintain the intent of the message and to skip/redacting providing all phrases from the original prompt to the external system (Fig.4A).
As to claim 7, Gu teaches wherein generating the second message for the external system using the result of the determination whether modification of the phrase will likely maintain the intent of the message comprises: in response to determining that modification of the phrase will likely maintain the intent of the message, providing, to a sanitization model (prompt revision model 304), the phrase as input; in response to providing the phrase as input, receiving, from the sanitization model, a replacement phrase for the phrase that does not include sensitive data; and generating, using the context, the second message that replaces at least some instances of the phrase with the replacement phrase (Fig.4; Col.2, lines 34-53; Col.3, lines 10-34, Col.6, lines 25-63).
As to claims 9-14, 16, Gu teaches the LLM gateway analyzing the prompt to determine a level of sensitivity associated with the prompt, wherein the level of sensitivity is determined based on an amount and/or degree of private information contained within the prompt, and wherein a prompt that includes private or confidential information may be further analyzed to determine whether the sensitive information is necessary to receive a complete response to the prompt. In cases where the sensitive information is not necessary, it may be redacted from the prompt or replaced with nonsensitive information and a revised prompt may be sent to an LLM server that offers a level of user privacy that is appropriate for the revised prompt (Col.5, lines 5-12; Col.6, lines 25-50).
As to claim 17, Gu teaches determining, using the phrase, whether the phrase should be analyzed using a sanitization process and the phrase likely includes sensitive data, wherein: determining the context for the phrase in the message is responsive to determining that the phrase should be analyzed using the sanitization process (Fig.4A; Col.2, lines 34-53; Col.3, lines 10-34, Col.6, lines 25-63).
As to claim 18, Gu teaches the operations comprising predicting/determining the intent of the message (Col.2, lines 34-53, Col.3, lines 10-34, Col.6, lines 25-63).
As to claim 21, Gu teaches wherein the message comprises at least one of a prompt, an email, or a text message (Fig.4A).
Regarding claims 22-23, the corresponding system and method comprising the steps similar to claim 1, are analogous therefore rejected as being anticipated by Gu et al for the foregoing reasons.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claim(s) 4 and 19-20 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Gu et al. (US 12,556,533) as applied above for claims 1 and 2 and in view of Teng et al. (US 2025/0131121)
As to claim 4, Gu doesn’t explicitly teach selecting, from a group comprising a local generative artificial intelligence system and at least one external generative artificial intelligence system, a generative artificial intelligence system, the local generative artificial intelligence system not being provided sanitized messages; and in response to selecting the generative artificial intelligence system, providing the second message to the generative artificial intelligence system.
However, Teng teaches a computing device configured to receive a user prompt 232, process the received user prompt 232 and context 242 to recognize 248 whether the prompt includes privacy information; and use the LXM to provide a response to the user prompt in a manner that will avoid disclosure of privacy information, wherein the method includes selectively providing the prompt to local generative artificial AI model 252 or cloud base model 203 (Figs.2C-2D).
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The combination of the analogous arts would be obvious to one of ordinary to one of ordinary skill in the art before the time of applicant’s invention for the purpose of avoiding the disclosure of highly sensitive information of the user by selecting a locally-hosted language models.
As to claims 19-20, Teng teaches blocking the transmission of the prompt to the external LXM system (Fig.2C).
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claim(s) 3 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Gu et al. (US 12,556,533) as applied above for claims 1 and 2, and in view of Gomez (US 2025/0165648).
As to claim 3, It is noted that, Gu doesn’t explicitly teach modification of the response for the generated second/revised prompts. However, Gomez teaches a method comprising receiving a prompt, detecting sensitive data in the prompt, generating a modified prompt query which anonymizes the sensitive data, submitting the modified prompt query to a large language model, and receiving a reply generated by the large language model. The reply contains anonymized sensitive data wherein the method further includes generating a modified reply which deanonymizes the anonymized sensitive data and presenting the modified reply on the user interface (Fig.4).
The combination of the analogous arts would be obvious to one of ordinary to one of ordinary skill in the art before the time of applicant’s invention for the purpose of providing the response to match the original prompt.
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Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
Claim(s) 8 and 15 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Gu et al. (US 12,556,533) as applied to claims 1, 2 and 7 above and further in view of Gharibi et al. (US 2025/0103746).
As to claims 8 and 15, Gu teaches where the sensitivity level associated with the prompt is determined but he doesn’t explicitly teach providing the phrase as input comprises providing, a sensitivity score for the phrase, and an importance score for the phrase. However, Gharibi teaches a system configured to receive a prompt to a target machine learning model and generate a redacted prompt wherein the redaction is performed based on a sensitivity score for the prompt based on a relevant of the prompt to a sensitive data (Pars.78-82; Figs.3A-3D).
The combination of the analogous arts would be obvious to one of ordinary to one of ordinary skill in the art before the time of applicant’s invention for the purpose of conveniently modifying prompts that contain sensitive information.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to DANIEL DEMELASH ABEBE whose telephone number is (571)272-7615. The examiner can normally be reached monday-friday 7-4.
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/DANIEL ABEBE/ Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2657