The Patent Wall, and Its Expiry DatesNarrow moat

Intuitive states its estate precisely: as of 31 December 2025, more than 5,600 patents granted and still in force and more than 2,500 pending worldwide, with an intention to keep filing in the United States and abroad¹. It supplements its own portfolio with exclusive and non-exclusive licences from third parties.

It also states the limitation in the same breath, which most companies do not: "Patents have finite terms. The expiration of a patent ends the exclusive rights accorded by the patent for the invention claimed."

That sentence is doing real work. The inventions that made da Vinci possible — the wristed EndoWrist instrument, the master-slave console, the stereo endoscope architecture — were filed in the 1990s and are public domain. Anyone can build a robot on those principles now, and several of the fourteen named competitors have.

What the current estate protects is the last decade of refinement: force feedback, the specific stapler and energy designs, imaging integration, the control algorithms, the instrument interfaces. Those are the things that make a da Vinci 5 better than a first-generation clone, and they will expire on their own schedule too.

The estate's more useful function may be defensive. In a field where fourteen companies are building similar mechanisms, a 5,600-patent portfolio is the thing that makes each of them design around Intuitive rather than through it — which costs them time, and time is the whole currency of this competition.

The number to watch is not the patent count, which will keep rising, but research and development spending: $1,311.8 million in 2025, up 15%² and 13.0% of revenue. A patent wall only stays useful if it is being rebuilt at the front.