Tesla has asked the US Supreme Court to decide whether any court may review the Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) when it refuses to hear a challenge to a patent’s validity — after the agency blocked Tesla‘s own challenges based on a trial forecast that missed by nearly two years.
The petition, filed this week, contends the agency has rewritten the patent-review system Congress built with limits found “nowhere in any statute.”
Additionally, the AI and EV giant argues that the Federal Circuit has closed the courthouse doors to anyone asking whether the agency had the power to do so.
Tesla‘s patents barred from challenging cover self-driving vehicle technology, one of the major fields for the Elon Musk-led company.
The stakes reach well beyond one case. Inter partes review, created by Congress in 2011, is how technology and automotive companies kill weak patents asserted against them at a fraction of litigation cost.
The petition argues the agency has throttled it so severely that institution rates have collapsed from 68.0% to 38.0% in two years while new petition filings have fallen 85.0%.
Missed by 2 Years
Granite Vehicle Ventures sued Tesla for patent infringement in December 2024 in the Eastern District of Texas, a favored venue for patent plaintiffs.
Tesla responded with four petitions for inter partes review of the asserted patents in May 2025 — months after being served, and well inside the one-year window Congress wrote into the statute.
The company then went further than the law requires.
To satisfy the agency’s own exception to its “time-to-trial” denial rule, Tesla filed a broadened stipulation surrendering invalidity defenses in court — including “system prior art” arguments it could never have raised in the administrative review at all.
The PTO denied institution anyway, in decisions signed in September and October 2025 by Deputy Director Coke Morgan Stewart under delegated authority.
The Board’s final decision, due in December 2026, would likely come after a district-court trial the agency predicted for October or November 2026, creating duplicated effort and “a risk of inconsistent decisions.”
The decisions noted the challenged patents had issued only in 2023 — a factor that under the agency’s own framework favored review — and set it aside.
The forecast then failed. The Texas court transferred the case to the Northern District of California in December, and trial is now scheduled for June 2028.
The new date comes nearly two years after the agency’s prediction, and long after the administrative review it refused would have finished. Tesla cites a study finding the agency’s trial-date predictions wrong 94.0% of the time.
Denying Petitions for No Reason
When Tesla sought review, the Federal Circuit denied its mandamus petition in February, holding that institution decisions are committed to the Director’s discretion and unreviewable absent “a colorable constitutional claim” — and that an argument the agency exceeded its statutory authority does not qualify.
The cert petition attacks that as a license without limit. Under the Federal Circuit’s rule, Tesla argues, the agency “could start denying IPR petitions merely because they were filed on Tuesdays” and no court could intervene.
The petition catalogs what the agency has built with that freedom: the time-to-trial rule itself, a “settled expectations” bar based on patent age, denials because a patent was challenged before by someone else, denials over positions taken in litigation, and a bar on petitioners affiliated with foreign governments.
None, the petition notes, went through notice-and-comment rulemaking, and since October some denials arrive as one-line notices with no stated reason at all. One scholar quoted in the filing concludes the review system is now “functionally suspended.”
An Industry-Wide Fight
Tesla‘s filing joins pending petitions from Google and Intel presenting the same question, with a fourth from Kahoot! expected — together covering, in the petition’s framing, every procedural path a company might use and both of the agency’s most consequential rules.
The company asks the Court to hear its case alongside the others, or at minimum hold it pending their outcome.
The scale of the shutout is precise: fourteen mandamus petitions have targeted the institution policies of Squires and his predecessor as acting director, Coke Morgan Stewart.
Twelve were rejected as challenges to nonappealable decisions, one was withdrawn — and the last, from Volkswagen Group of America, was denied in March. Tesla itself was separately denied review in November under the litigation-positions rule.
The agency and patent owners have the statute’s text on their side of the argument: Congress wrote that institution decisions “shall be final and nonappealable,” and the Supreme Court has described the decision to deny a petition as committed to the agency’s discretion.
Defenders of the regime argue the denials protect patent holders from serial attacks and conserve agency resources when a trial will resolve validity anyway — the efficiency logic the PTO invoked in Tesla‘s own case.
