@pipeworx/uspto-office-actions

USPTO patent prosecution history — office action full text, examiner/applicant citations (plus AI/ML-extracted "enriched citation" metadata), claim-level rejection data (35 U.S.C. 101/102/103/112), and Commissioner final decisions on patent application petitions.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1837+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• search_office_actions(application_number | patent_number, limit) — office actions on an application: action type, mail date, examiner employee number, art unit, newest first.

• get_office_action_text(document_id | (application_number + mail_date)) — one office action's full text, its length, and a truncation flag.

• get_office_action_rejections(application_number, limit) — claim-level rejection data: AGGREGATE counts of 101/102/103/112/double-patenting rejection records first, per-record detail last.

• get_office_action_citations(application_number, limit) — references cited in office actions, who cited them (examiner vs applicant), plus the AI/ML-extracted enriched-citation fields (category code, claim/paragraph passage mapping) when USPTO has them for that citation.

• search_petition_decisions(query | application_number, decided_after, decided_before, limit, offset) — Commissioner / Office of Petitions final decisions: decision type, decision date, petition type, deciding office.

Related MCP server: mcp-patents

Auth

Platform key (PLATFORM_USPTO_KEY) with BYO override via _apiKey. Get a free key at https://data.uspto.gov/myodp. As of 2026-10, USPTO requires ID.me identity verification plus four profile fields on new/renewed ODP accounts — a BYO key from an account that has not completed that will read as rejected even though it is correctly formatted.

Data sources

• USPTO, Open Data Portal — Office Action Text Retrieval dataset (public domain, CC0 mark). Covers published office actions starting with the 12-million application series.

• USPTO, Open Data Portal — Office Action Citations dataset.

• USPTO, Open Data Portal — Office Action Rejection dataset.

• USPTO, Open Data Portal — Enriched Citation (AI/ML-extracted) dataset.

• USPTO, Open Data Portal — Final Petition Decisions dataset.

Name the publisher and dataset only, never a route — the exact endpoints live in src/index.ts.

Notes

• The legacy developer.uspto.gov Office Action APIs are dead (blanket 301 to data.uspto.gov/home, confirmed 2026-10-18). This pack calls their live replacements on api.uspto.gov.

• The real request shape took FIVE rounds of live probing to find (fleet #3305, 2026-10-18 — cluster-c's own probe, then Antonio, then this pack's own follow-ups, then Antonio again). THREE shapes are disproven, not just untried — do not re-try them: (1) a simple GET /office-actions resource exists (401 with no key, 403 "Forbidden" with a bad one) but rejects every query shape tried against it (q/size alone, or hedged with legacy criteria/rows) with "missing path or query params" — its real contract is still unknown and this pack does NOT call it; (2) GET <route>/search and GET <route>/<applicationNumber> are both disproven directly against the live upstream — both answer 403 "Missing Authentication Token" on ANY key, the AWS routing-level "no such resource" signature; neither sub-path exists. (3) What this pack actually calls: POST /api/v1/patent/oa/<dataset>/<version>/records, form-encoded criteria (Lucene)/start/rows — the ORIGINAL dataset routes from the open-source patent-dev/uspto-odp Go client's own checked-in OpenAPI specs, first misread as dead because a bogus-key probe against them returned the SAME STATUS CODE (403) as this pack's own bogus-path control. The actual distinguishing signal on this subtree is the BODY: {"message":"Forbidden"} means "real route, bad key"; {"message":"Missing Authentication Token"} means "no such resource" — two different 403 bodies, previously conflated into one status code. A live keyless probe confirmed all four dataset/version pairs answer "Forbidden". See OA_DATASETS in src/index.ts for the exact dataset/version table and which swagger file backs each entry — enriched citations' primary candidate uses the swagger file's own dataset name (enriched_cited_reference_metadata, v3) rather than the oa_enriched_citations v1/v2 guessed live, kept as a fallback. If this is STILL wrong, every tool accepts include_raw: true, which skips normal parsing/error-handling and returns the bare upstream HTTP status + first 500 chars of body instead — a live probe can self-diagnose the next miss without a code change + redeploy cycle.

• The response envelope is the classic Solr shape ({response:{numFound,docs:[...]}}, confirmed via real response examples from the open-source patent-dev/uspto-odp Go client). An unrecognized shape throws loudly (upstream_parse: ...) with the raw body, rather than returning a quiet empty result.

• Final Petition Decisions is fully confirmed, not inferred: both its route (/api/v1/petition/decisions/search, POST, JSON {q, pagination:{offset,limit}, filters:[{name,value}]}) and its response shape ({count, petitionDecisionDataBag:[...]}) match the same Go client's checked-in real example responses, and the route itself was independently confirmed live (401 Unauthorized) by this pack's own probe.

• USPTO's null-date sentinel is "0001-01-01T00:00:00" — treated as null everywhere in this pack's output (an ungranted application has no grant_date, not a 1-AD one).

• obsoleteDocumentIdentifier (USPTO's own, oddly-retained field name) is exposed to callers as document_id — it is the stable per-document key, not actually obsolete data.

• No fleet-held credential was reachable from a local/dev run while building this pack (the platform key lives only in the deployed gateway's secret store), so the pre-deploy smoke test below exercises real network calls to api.uspto.gov and confirms the request/response code runs cleanly, but could only observe the auth-rejection path, not a real payload. The first real verification is the live, authenticated post-deploy probe.

Quick Start

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

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "uspto-office-actions": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/uspto-office-actions/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/uspto-office-actions/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 1837+ 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_office_actions \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"application_number":"17248024","limit":5}'

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

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

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

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-uspto-office-actions

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

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 Uspto Office Actions data" })

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

More

• Docs and guides

• pipeworx.io

License

MIT