Hugging Face & FriendliAI settle zero-dollar patent infringement lawsuit

Hugging AI, a popular platform for AI models, has settled a patent infringement lawsuit with Korean-based startup FriendliAI.

Filed roughly two years ago, the lawsuit alleged Hugging Face of violating FriendliAI’s patent related to “batching with iteration-level schedule,” a method for processing multiple requests in AI systems.

The legal case, identified as Civil Case No. 1:23cv-00816-MN, is officially closed, but the court will still oversee the terms of their settlement. Both companies have reached a confidential agreement to settle it, dated January 8.

As a part of the settlement, both agreed to dismiss the case without any costs or fees for either side and it cannot be refiled, despite FriendliAI’s initial request for compensatory damages and other legal actions.

In the initial patent document, the Korean startup says that its technology specifically covers AI systems to enable finished requests within a batch to be sent to a user while new requests can be added to the batch before the full batch has been processed. It claims that Hugging Face’s Text Generation Inference tool used this method leading to the lawsuit.

Hugging Face, which is valued at $4.5 billion, has strong financial backing from the likes of Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, and Salesforce. Most recently, it secured $235 million in a Series D funding round back in August 2023.

In Hugging Face-related news, Microsoft has released Phi-4, Redmond’s latest small model, as a fully open-source project on the platform amid strong competition from OpenAI and its new o3 model.