The China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) has announced comprehensive amendments to the Patent Examination Guidelines, effective 1 January 2026 — the most substantial update to China's patent examination framework in recent years, touching inventor disclosure, dual filing strategy, inventiveness assessment, invalidation procedure, and specialised criteria for AI and bitstream-related inventions.

I. Preliminary Examination and Transaction Processing

Mandatory inventor information: only genuine natural-person inventors — those making a substantive creative contribution — may be listed; corporate entities or institutions cannot be named regardless of their funding role. Complete ID/passport information is now required at filing, and false or fraudulent designations risk administrative penalties.

Priority declarations in divisional applications: a divisional application that fails to explicitly declare a priority claim validly held by its parent will now be deemed not to have claimed that priority — a stricter approach than the previous automatic-inheritance practice. Examiners will issue a remedial notice allowing restoration within a prescribed time limit, but applicants should not rely on this safety net and should declare all relevant priority claims explicitly at filing.

Sequence listing fee relief: pages comprising a sequence listing submitted in the prescribed electronic format (WIPO ST.26) no longer count toward the specification's page total for additional-fee calculation purposes — a welcome cost reduction for biotech and pharma filings, though sequence listings embedded as plain text in the specification body still count.

II. Substantive Examination of Inventions

Dual filing flexibility eliminated: China permits filing both an invention patent and a utility model for the same technical solution on the same day. Previously, if the invention patent was allowable, the applicant could amend its claims to differentiate from the utility model and retain both. That option is now removed — if the invention patent is allowable, the applicant must abandon the utility model, or the invention patent will be rejected or deemed withdrawn.

Inventiveness assessment refined: two clarifications matter most. First, only features actually recited in the claims are considered for inventive step — technical effects described only in the specification or drawings are disregarded. Second, even claimed features are disregarded if they don't contribute to solving the technical problem — preventing applicants from padding otherwise-obvious claims with technically insignificant limitations.

III. Re-examination and Invalidation Procedures

Strengthened res judicata: the prohibition on repeat invalidation requests now extends from "same reasons and evidence" to "same or substantially the same reasons and evidence" — closing the door on requests that merely repackage previously-rejected arguments. Parties should front-load all grounds and evidence into their initial invalidation request.

Genuine-party requirement for invalidation requesters: requests must reflect the genuine intention of, and be filed by or on behalf of, the actual party in interest — targeting the practice of filing under false names or forged authorisation to shield the true challenger from accountability. CNIPA may refuse requests where the named requester appears not to be the true party in interest.

IV. Artificial Intelligence Inventions

Specialised drafting requirements now apply. For AI model construction/training claims, the specification must describe the essential architecture (layers, modules, interconnections) and the training process (data selection, hyperparameters, evaluation methodology). For claims applying AI models to a specific technical field, the disclosure must show how field-specific input data is configured, how the model processes it toward the technical problem, and how output achieves the technical effect — demonstrating a concrete technical solution rather than an abstract algorithm.

V. Bitstream-Related Inventions

Claims directed solely to a bitstream — without structural or functional limitations beyond the data content — are now explicitly excluded as "rules and methods of intellectual activity." However, claims to methods of storing or transmitting a bitstream remain patentable if they recite the underlying encoding process, and claims to computer-readable storage media are patentable where they recite the medium, the stored program/instructions, and a bitstream generated by executing that program via a processor performing video encoding — tying the claim to a concrete technical implementation.

Strategic Implications

These amendments collectively signal CNIPA's push to raise patent quality and close procedural loopholes, while adapting the examination framework to AI and biotech innovation. Applicants and practitioners should audit pending Chinese filings now against each of these five areas ahead of the 1 January 2026 effective date.