What AI research, patents and partnerships does Capital One have?
Capital One does AI research in-house and files for it: more than 5,000 granted U.S. patents by June 2025, 472 AI patents granted in 2024 (sixth of all companies and the top bank on Harrity's 2025 AI Patent 100), and a 2026 docket that includes granted patents on selective AI processing of sensitive data and AI cyber-threat detection plus published applications on agentic conversation, safeguarding user-facing AI models and personalised chatbot responses, all assigned to Capital One Services, LLC. The research arm, led by chief scientist Prem Natarajan and AI Foundations head Milind Naphade, publishes on LLM training, alignment and multi-agent reasoning (20-plus accepted papers at NeurIPS 2025; gold sponsor at ICLR 2026) and funds centers at Columbia, USC, Illinois and UVA and the NSF's AI Research Institutes. Its models come from open-source bases (Meta's Llama for Chat Concierge) run on AWS, with Snowflake, Databricks and Nvidia as platform partners. Capital One Ventures holds stakes in Databricks, Evinced, GetReal and Socure, and the bank bought Discover (May 2025, 2,200-plus AI staff) and Brex (April 2026, agentic business payments).[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]
Data as of Oct 15, 2026 · Capital One profile updated Oct 1, 2026 · 48 sources cited on this page · 140 banks profiled on this site
Which AI patents has Capital One been granted or filed recently?
Assignee Capital One Services, LLC. Granted patents carry a grant date; applications carry their publication date and are not yet rights. Selected from Google Patents on October 15, 2026 for relevance to language models, agents and AI safety; the full portfolio is far larger.
| Number | Title | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| US12699806B1 | Selective artificial intelligence processing of sensitive data | Granted | August 4, 2026 (filed January 21, 2026)[3] |
| US12695830B2 | System and method for identifying themes in interactive communications | Granted | July 28, 2026[16] |
| US12682077B2 | Generating threat statements for a threat model using artificial intelligence | Granted | July 14, 2026 (filed June 13, 2024)[17] |
| US12603903B2 | Methods and systems for cyber threat detection using artificial intelligence models in data-sparse environments | Granted | April 14, 2026 (priority July 8, 2022)[4] |
| EP4793794A1 | Knowledge gap detection for agentic conversation | Application published | August 19, 2026 (priority February 14, 2025)[5] |
| US20260222443A1 | Data protection for machine learning models trained on client data | Application published | July 30, 2026 (priority September 9, 2024)[18] |
| US20260212136A1 | Personalized responses to chatbot prompt based on embedding spaces between user and society | Application published | July 23, 2026 (priority January 22, 2024)[7] |
| EP4776166A1 | Systems and methods for safeguarding user-facing artificial intelligence models | Application published | July 15, 2026 (priority January 8, 2025)[6] |
| US20260170256A1 | Multi-turn dialogue response generation with autoregressive transformer models | Application published (continuation) | June 18, 2026 (priority July 22, 2019)[19] |
| Portfolio | More than 5,000 granted U.S. patents (June 2025); 472 AI patents granted in 2024, up 14%, sixth overall and the top bank on Harrity's AI Patent 100; the 10-K notes AI-generated output may not be protectable | Totals | 2024-2026[1][2][20] |
Who are Capital One's AI partners, and what has it invested in?
Universities, government, model and platform providers, venture stakes and acquisitions, as announced. Amounts are pledges or deal values as published.
| Partner | Type | What it is | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Columbia Engineering (CAIRFI) | University center | $3 million for the Center for AI and Responsible Financial Innovation; annual research awards; partnership of 'more than a decade' | March 2024[21][22][23] |
| USC Viterbi (CREDIF) | University center | $3 million Center for Responsible AI and Decision Making in Finance; EPSVec differentially private synthetic data and BioTamperNet came out of it | April 2024[24][25][10] |
| University of Illinois (ASKS Center) | University center | $3 million over five years for generative-AI safety, knowledge systems and cybersecurity; tech incubator lab at Illinois since 2015 | June 2025[26] |
| National Science Foundation | Government | $1 million a year for five years to the National AI Research Institutes program (NSF ARIA), part of NSF's $100 million for five new institutes | July 2025[27] |
| University of Virginia | University | $4.5 million AI Research Neighborhood and PhD fellowships (2025); Capital One Hub at the School of Data Science (2024); 2025-27 faculty fellows | October 2025[28][29] |
| Maryland, NYU, MIT CSAIL | University labs | Named applied-research partners: University of Maryland Center for Machine Learning, NYU Tandon and Center for Data Science, MIT CSAIL | November 2023[30] |
| Stanford | Research collaboration | mR3, a multilingual reward reasoning model trained on 72 languages, developed with Stanford (ICLR 2026) | April 2026[10] |
| Partnership on AI | Standards body | Member since February 2024 | February 2024[31] |
| Meta (Llama) | Model provider | Chat Concierge built on Meta's open-source Llama, customised with proprietary data; MACAW runs fine-tuned open-weight models | March 2025[11][32] |
| AWS | Cloud | All infrastructure on AWS since the 2020 data-center exit; Eno built on EC2, Lambda and DynamoDB; the 10-K names AWS as the principal cloud platform | 2020; 2026[33][20] |
| Nvidia | Hardware and ecosystem | Presented at GTC 2026 on foundation models for finance and agent quality review; booth drew more than 1,200 visitors | March 2026[34] |
| Snowflake and Databricks | Data platforms | 6,000-plus analysts on Snowflake (2022); 4,000-plus users running more than 5 million Databricks jobs (2025); Capital One Software sells Slingshot and Databolt for both | 2022; 2025[35][36] |
| Databricks (Capital One Ventures) | Venture investment | Stake in the data and AI company that 'provides foundational infrastructure for Capital One's AI/ML and data operations' | September 2025 (disclosed)[12] |
| Evinced and GetReal (Capital One Ventures) | Venture investments | Evinced uses AI to find accessibility issues in development; GetReal tackles deepfakes and malicious AI content | September 2025 (disclosed)[12] |
| Socure (Capital One Ventures) | Venture investment | Identity-verification vendor; Socure said the investment made Capital One 'one of our top clients' | June 2021[13] |
| Sync Computing team | Acqui-hire | MIT spin-out's cost and performance optimisation team joined Capital One Software to accelerate Slingshot for Databricks | June 2025[36] |
| Discover | Acquisition | Closed May 18, 2025; added more than 2,200 AI professionals per Evident | May 2025[37][14] |
| Brex | Acquisition | $5.15 billion; 35,000 clients and agentic AI products for business payments; closed April 7, 2026 | April 2026[38][15] |
What does Capital One's AI research program publish?
The Applied AI research group and AI Foundations team, with the venues and dates the bank reports.
| Output | What it is | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Applied AI research agenda | LLM training, customisation and alignment; synthetic data; multi-agent reasoning | November 20, 2025[8] |
| NeurIPS 2025 | More than 20 accepted papers plus workshop papers, on responsible AI, multi-agent systems, LLM evaluation (T1 tool-use benchmark), fairness and account-takeover fraud detection; many first-authored by Applied Research interns | November 20, 2025[9] |
| ICLR 2026 | Gold sponsor; LLM alignment, uncertainty quantification, DynaGuard guardian model, mR3 (with Stanford), EPSVec and BioTamperNet (with USC) | April 20, 2026[10] |
| AAAI 2025 PDLM workshop | Input-guardrail judge models; Outstanding Paper Award | January 2025[39] |
| Nvidia GTC 2026 | Sessions on distributed data pipelines for 'laser-focused foundation models for financial applications' and agent-assisted quality review | March 16-19, 2026[34] |
| Capital One AI Symposium | Inaugural two-day event in McLean on multi-sector AI partnerships | April 2026[40] |
| Open source | Data Profiler and rubicon-ml (2021), Global Attribution Mapping (2019), VulnHunter (2026) | 2019-2026[41][42][43] |
What does the Capital One profile record on this topic?
The rows below are the entries of the Capital One AI strategy profile that bear on this page, as of Oct 1, 2026; the profile holds the full record of 31 dated moves, 13 use cases and 46 sources.
| Use case | What the record shows | Status | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brex agentic payments | Agentic AI products for corporate cards and expenses, acquired with Brex. | In production | [15] |
| Socure identity-fraud screening (U.S. Card) | Socure says its identity verification raised approval rates and cut false positives for the Capital One U.S. Card team (vendor-reported, 2021); Socure's company page still lists Capital One among organisations using it. | In production | [13][44] |
| Date | Move | Detail | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 21, 2026 | Q2 2026 call: AI infrastructure investment continues; Brex models to be calibrated | Investment focus stays on the technology transformation and AI infrastructure; full Brex acceleration needs data pipelines and model calibration. | [45][46] |
| Apr 23, 2026 | Inaugural Capital One AI Symposium | Two days in McLean on multi-sector AI partnerships. | [40] |
| Apr 20, 2026 | ICLR 2026: alignment and guardian-model research | Gold sponsor and contributor on LLM alignment, uncertainty and responsible agentic systems, including the DynaGuard guardian model. | [10] |
| Apr 7, 2026 | Brex deal closes | 35,000 clients and a suite of agentic AI products join the business-banking strategy. | [15][47] |
| Jan 22, 2026 | Q4 2025 call: a stack built 'working backwards from the AI revolution' | Fairbank says the bank is 'now building AI solutions across our businesses' and that Brex has deployed in-house AI agents for expense management and audit. | [48] |
| Jan 22, 2026 | Agrees to buy Brex for $5.15 billion | Corporate cards, expense software and nearly $13 billion in deposits at partner banks. | [38] |
| Nov 20, 2025 | Applied AI research agenda published | LLM training, customisation and alignment; synthetic data; multi-agent reasoning. | [8] |
| Oct 27, 2025 | $4.5 million UVA AI research initiative | Including the Capital One AI Research Neighborhood at UVA Engineering. | [28] |
| Jul 29, 2025 | NSF partnership on AI research institutes | $1 million a year for five years supporting NSF's AI research ecosystem. | [27] |
| Jun 24, 2025 | Patented AI, described | The bank on its 'analytical DNA' and customer-centred AI patents. | [1] |
| Jun 4, 2025 | ASKS Center for generative-AI safety at Illinois | Capital One and the University of Illinois launch the Center for Generative AI Safety, Knowledge Systems and Cybersecurity; AI Foundations SVP Milind Naphade among its contributors. | [26] |
| May 18, 2025 | Discover acquisition completes | Adds more than 2,200 AI professionals to the talent pool, per Evident. | [37][14] |
How many AI patents does Capital One have?
Capital One said in June 2025 that it held more than 5,000 granted U.S. patents in total. Harrity's 2025 AI Patent 100, reported by Bank Automation News, counted 472 AI patents granted to Capital One in 2024, up 14%, placing it sixth among all companies and first among banks. Google Patents lists thousands of filings under the assignee Capital One Services, LLC; the 2026 grants and applications on this page are a relevance-selected sample, not a count.
Which recent Capital One patents cover language models and agents?
Published in 2026: EP4793794A1 'Knowledge gap detection for agentic conversation' (August 19), EP4776166A1 'Systems and methods for safeguarding user-facing artificial intelligence models' (July 15), US20260212136A1 'Personalized responses to chatbot prompt based on embedding spaces between user and society' (July 23) and US20260170256A1 'Multi-turn dialogue response generation with autoregressive transformer models' (June 18, a continuation of a 2019 priority). Granted: US12699806B1 'Selective artificial intelligence processing of sensitive data' (August 4, 2026). Applications are not yet enforceable rights.
Which universities does Capital One partner with on AI?
Funded centers at Columbia (CAIRFI, $3 million, 2024), USC (CREDIF, $3 million, 2024), the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (ASKS, $3 million over five years, 2025) and the University of Virginia ($4.5 million AI Research Neighborhood and fellowships, 2025, after the 2024 Capital One Hub). Named applied-research partners also include the University of Maryland Center for Machine Learning, NYU Tandon and Center for Data Science, and MIT CSAIL; a 2026 reward model was built with Stanford. The bank gives $1 million a year for five years to the NSF's National AI Research Institutes.
Which AI model providers does Capital One use?
Its disclosed approach is to customise open-source models rather than license closed ones: Chat Concierge is built on Meta's Llama customised with proprietary data, the input-guardrail research fine-tuned Mistral and Llama models, and the MACAW workflow runs fine-tuned open-weight models. In September 2026 Prem Natarajan said the bank was moving to smaller, specialised open-weight models to cut latency and token cost. Capital One has not announced a partnership with OpenAI, Anthropic or Google for its production models. Infrastructure is AWS; Nvidia, Snowflake and Databricks are platform partners.
What does Capital One Ventures invest in?
The bank's venture arm describes itself as a developmental partner that gives startups pilots and real-world use cases. AI-relevant holdings it has disclosed: Databricks (data and AI infrastructure the bank itself runs on), Evinced (AI for accessibility testing in software development), GetReal (deepfake and malicious-AI-content detection) and Socure (identity verification, 2021). Capital One does not publish the size of its stakes.
What did Capital One get from the Discover and Brex acquisitions in AI terms?
Discover, completed May 18, 2025, added more than 2,200 AI professionals according to Evident, taking Capital One to the second-largest AI talent pool in banking after JPMorgan. Brex, agreed January 2026 for $5.15 billion and closed April 7, 2026, brought 35,000 business clients, a suite of agentic AI products for corporate cards and expense management, and, per CEO Richard Fairbank, in-house AI agents for expense management and audit; on the July 2026 call he said full acceleration needs data pipelines and model calibration first.
Who leads AI research at Capital One?
Prem Natarajan, EVP, Chief Scientist and Head of Enterprise AI, who joined in 2023 from running Alexa AI at Amazon, leads the enterprise AI organisation. Milind Naphade, SVP and Head of AI Foundations, runs the research team that builds the agent systems and publishes at NeurIPS and ICLR; Sambit Sahu, a VP in AI Foundations, is a frequent author and an ASKS Center contributor. Rashmi Shetty is VP of Enterprise AI. The 2025 Applied Research Internship program first-authors many of the papers.
- Shaping Financial Services with Patented AI
- Inside Capital One Auto's innovation, patent strategy
- US12699806B1: Selective artificial intelligence processing of sensitive data (granted)
- US12603903B2: Methods and systems for cyber threat detection using artificial intelligence models in data-sparse environments (granted)
- EP4793794A1: Knowledge gap detection for agentic conversation (application)
- EP4776166A1: Systems and methods for safeguarding user-facing artificial intelligence models (application)
- US20260212136A1: Personalized responses to chatbot prompt based on embedding spaces between user and society (application)
- Capital One's Applied AI research
- NeurIPS 2025: Capital One showcases leading AI research
- NLP research foundations at ICLR 2026
- AI for Car Dealerships: Smarter Car Shopping
- Capital One Ventures: Why we invest in tech startups
- Socure Increases Approval Rates and Slashes False Positives for Capital One U.S. Card Team as Capital One Ventures Completes Strategic Investment in Company
- BofA, Capital One, Citi lead charge to scale AI talent pool
- Capital One pushes deeper into AI, business payments (Brex closes)
- US12695830B2: System and method for identifying themes in interactive communications (granted)
- US12682077B2: Generating threat statements for a threat model using artificial intelligence (granted)
- US20260222443A1: Data protection for machine learning models trained on client data (application)
- US20260170256A1: Multi-turn dialogue response generation with autoregressive transformer models (application)
- Capital One Financial Corporation Annual Report on Form 10-K for 2025
- Capital One and Columbia University partner to establish the Center for AI and Responsible Financial Innovation (CAIRFI)
- Kicking Off the Center of Responsible AI and Finance
- Capital One and Columbia University: 2025 CAIRFI AI research award recipients
- Capital One and USC launch the Center for Responsible AI and Decision Making in Finance (CREDIF)
- CREDIF spring 2025 AI awards and fellowship recipients (USC)
- Capital One and University of Illinois launch ASKS Center
- Capital One partners with NSF to advance U.S. AI leadership
- Capital One deepens UVA partnership to advance AI research
- UVA School of Data Science: Capital One Fellows 2025-2027
- Capital One participates in U.S. Senate AI Insight Forum (remarks by Prem Natarajan)
- Capital One joins the Partnership on AI
- Why Capital One built its multi-agent AI platform around open-weight models (presented by Capital One)
- Capital One Completes Migration from Data Centers to AWS, Becomes First US Bank to Announce Going All In on the Cloud (case study; page retrieved 2026-10-15)
- Capital One at NVIDIA GTC 2026
- Capital One Launches Capital One Software (Slingshot for Snowflake)
- Capital One Software strengthens partnership with Databricks
- Capital One Completes Acquisition of Discover
- Capital One Strikes $5.15 Billion Deal for Fintech Brex
- Refining input guardrails for safer LLM applications (AAAI 2025 PDLM workshop, Outstanding Paper Award)
- Insights from the inaugural Capital One AI Symposium
- How Capital One is developing for the bank of the future
- Global Attribution Mapping (GAM): open-sourcing explainability for neural networks
- Capital One releases VulnHunter, an open-source AI tool that finds software flaws before hackers do
- About Socure (undated page, retrieved 2026-09-24)
- Capital One Financial Corporation Q2 2026 Earnings Call Summary
- Capital One highlights Discover, Brex integration
- Capital One completes acquisition of Brex
- Capital One (COF) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript
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