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10 September 2021PatentsAlex Baldwin

AI company asks Shanghai court to bar iPhone sales in China

A Chinese AI company has ramped up a patent dispute over Apple’s virtual assistant ‘Siri’, asking the Shanghai High People’s Court to bar the production and sale of iPhones in China.

Shanghai Zhizhen Intelligent Network Technology approached the court requesting a preliminary injunction against the US mobile giant on Friday, September 3, claiming that Siri infringed its AI patent, according to a story by the South China Morning Post.

The AI firm, also known as Xiaoi Robot, announced on the company WeChat account that it had filed the preliminary injunction.

This is the latest action in the long-running dispute between the two companies, which first started in 2012 following Xiaoi’s claims that the Siri feature, which debuted with the iPhone 4S in 2011, infringed one of its “chat robot” patents.

The patent—Chinese patent no. ZL200410053749.9—was granted in 2009 and covers an AI-controlled chat robot system.

In response to the 2012 suit, Apple filed an invalidation request to the Patent Reexamination Board (PRB) of the State Intellectual Property Office. Following eight years of litigation on the validity of the patent, the Supreme People’s Court confirmed that the patent was valid in June 2020, according to the National Law Review .

Xiaoi also filed a prior lawsuit with Shanghai High People’s Court on August 3, 2020, seeking 10 billion RMB ($1.55 billion) for the alleged patent infringement, according to the Global Times .

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