@pipeworx/cipo

Canadian patents and patent applications — search by owner or applicant name, or look up one record by number for its status, filing date and issue date.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1856+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• search_cipo_patents(name, role, limit) — search by current owner or applicant name and get back matching patents/applications: number, title, relevance. role is "owner" (current owner of record) or "applicant" (party that filed); these can differ after an assignment.

• get_cipo_patent(number) — one patent/application's full bibliographic record: English/French title, current status, filing date, issue/grant date (blank until granted), owners, applicants, inventors, IPC classification.

Related MCP server: mcp-patents

Auth

Keyless. No registration, no API key.

Data sources

• Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO), Canadian Patents Database — every patent application filed in Canada and every patent granted by Canada, Canadian-origin or foreign-origin alike. Live per-request calls against CIPO's own public search service; nothing is downloaded or mirrored.

Notes

• A patent that has only been filed, not yet granted, has an empty issued_date — that is CIPO's own data, not a missing field on our side.

• filing_date is whichever CIPO calls the earliest filing event for that record — the domestic filed date for most applications, or the PCT filing date for one that entered Canada via the PCT national phase. Both answer "when was this filed."

• Numbers are CIPO patent/application numbers, at most 7 digits. A "CA" prefix, spaces or dashes in the input are stripped automatically.

• CIPO's own CPD has had intermittent data-quality issues since its 2024 "Next Generation Patents" migration (their notice, not ours) — status fields on some records may lag or show as blank even when the application is active. That is upstream, and this pack surfaces whatever CIPO currently reports.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cipo": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/cipo/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/cipo/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1856+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_cipo_patents \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"name":"Shopify Inc.","role":"applicant","limit":5}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_cipo_patents. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-cipo is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/cipo/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cipo": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-cipo"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Cipo data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides

• pipeworx.io

License

MIT