Washington got one right for a change. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s proposed new “One Challenge” rule may finally break Big Tech’s stranglehold on innovation, revitalize our patent system, and supercharge America’s growth.
The establishment of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board was billed as a fair and expeditious means of rooting out weak patents. In practice, it became a legal meat grinder, and large corporations quickly learned how to weaponize it. Small inventors found that a successful patent defense in district court would only be followed by successive rounds of costly review. When the same patent can be attacked repeatedly, patent rights turn into revocable permissions, and only the deepest pockets survive.
The USPTO’s proposal is a long-overdue fix. Once a patent claim has run the gauntlet in court or at the PTAB and survived, its validity should be regarded as final. This simple principle restores what property is supposed to mean in a free economy. It tells investors, entrepreneurs, universities, and corporate labs that once their patent prevails, the government will not invite serial do-overs until the better-financed side wins by exhaustion.
Reliable patent rights aren’t a legal abstraction; they are the very heart of American innovation. It often takes a decade or more and huge sums of capital to take an inventor’s dream from drawing board to global-scale production. Investors make those high-risk bets because patents can secure a return if the science works. But strip away patent reliability, and that equation breaks down. It means that promising technologies remain on the shelf while investment dollars flow to those who can afford to fund litigation as part of their cost of doing business.
Large tech firms are actively resisting efforts to reform the PTAB process under which they can lose in court and yet later prevail by slightly repackaging a challenge. Big Tech is not defending quality, but a process that is being used to kill ideas.
As 2025’s Nobel Prize in economics demonstrates, the fight goes deeper than patent procedure. Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt were honored for explaining how innovation and creative destruction drive long-run prosperity. Mokyr’s research into the Industrial Revolution shows that modern growth took off when societies created institutions that rewarded problem-solvers and allowed knowledge to accumulate, and that breakthrough technologies became self-reinforcing only when others could understand, replicate, and improve on them.
Aghion and Howitt’s theory of growth through creative destruction holds that progress comes when new firms and technologies leap ahead of established market leaders. Their research finds that innovation and diffusion of knowledge are the primary drivers of growth. Strong but time-limited property rights, especially patents, encourage risky research while forcing ideas into the open. But they also warn that incumbent interests will predictably try to block innovations that threaten their market position.
A sound patent system sits at the center of the framework outlined by these Nobel-winning economists. Patents grant temporary, enforceable rights in exchange for public disclosure of how an invention works, which becomes fuel for the next generation of innovators. Periods of strong, predictable patent protection have led to leaps in productivity, rising real incomes, and greater social mobility as new firms with new technologies disrupted the status quo.
But the Nobel laureates also warn about institutional capture. When rules are bent into tools for rent seeking, protection becomes the goal, and growth sputters. That is exactly what happens when well-funded incumbents can pound the same patents with serial PTAB petitions long after those patents have been examined, issued, and upheld. The system ends up rewarding legal trench warfare instead of the best ideas.
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Critics claim the USPTO proposal would shield weak patents. That is a distraction. Weak patents already face tough scrutiny, and they should fail. The “one challenge” reform does not guarantee victory for anyone. It simply bars endless retries after a full and fair hearing. Real property rights in any healthy economy come with that kind of certainty. It is that clarity that keeps capital flowing to ambitious inventors instead of into safer, less productive uses.
America’s greatest economic leaps were driven by entrepreneurs and investors who trusted that genuine breakthroughs would be honored. The USPTO’s One Challenge rule moves the system back toward that pro-growth equilibrium. If Washington truly wants to beat foreign competition, create jobs, and discover cures for diseases more quickly, it should not operate a system that allows legal gamesmanship to smother innovation. Adopt the rule, make patents reliable again, and let American ingenuity do the rest.
Steve Forbes is chairman and editor-in-chief of Forbes.