Across the portfolio, the question "who owns mixture-of-experts?" has a cleaner answer than most AI-IP questions do — and the answer is Google. The foundational grant, US10719761B2, "Mixture of experts neural networks," issued July 21, 2020, names Noam Shazeer, Azalia Mirhoseini, and Krzysztof Maziarz as inventors and Google LLC as assignee. It is classified G06N 3/0454 and G06N 3/08 — neural-network architecture, squarely in the core class.
What makes this a family rather than a single record is the continuation chain. US12067476B2, also titled "Mixture of experts neural networks" and also assigned to Google, issued August 20, 2024 with the same three inventors. Then US12518135B2, "Sparse and differentiable mixture of experts neural networks," issued January 6, 2026 — a newer team (Zhao, Sathiamoorthy, Hong, Chi, Chowdhery, and others) but the same assignee, extending the family toward routing that can be trained end to end. Three grants, six years, one owner.
The whitespace is instructive precisely because there isn't much of it on the foundational mechanism. When a single assignee holds the originating grant plus its continuations, later entrants are pushed toward variations — different gating schemes, different load-balancing, domain-specific applications — rather than the core routing idea itself. You can see that pressure in adjacent published applications: Google's own US20260162656A1, a mixture-of-expert conformer for streaming multilingual speech recognition (published, not granted), applies MoE to a specific domain rather than re-claiming the base architecture.
A caveat this analyst always attaches: a patent family's ownership tells you who holds the granted claims, not who practices the technique or who would prevail in a dispute. Mixture-of-experts is implemented widely across the industry; that is a question of freedom-to-operate and licensing, not of who is listed as assignee. Counting grants establishes concentration of rights, not concentration of use.
And the count here is filing-date sensitive, as all such counts are. New continuations and new entrants' applications are published constantly; the 2026 grant shows the family was still active six years on. The snapshot is "as of now, the foundational MoE grants are Google's." It is not a prediction that the landscape stays that tidy.
Still, the headline holds. If you want to know who owns the patents on the architecture quietly powering the largest models, the granted record points in one direction. Read claim 1 of US10719761B2 and you are reading the document the rest of the field has had to design around.