The Patent War Nobody Noticed

In its January 2026 prospectus, Alpha Modus Holdings described itself as a company building "AI-powered retail intelligence technologies" with patents spanning "computer vision, behavioral analytics, contextual advertising, pricing and promotions, and closed-loop measurement." It touted an "IP-driven platform" that would unlock "new opportunities" across retail and digital commerce. The language was the language of growth — a company selling a vision to investors.

Seven pages later, a different sentence: the company's independent auditors had "expressed substantial doubt about Alpha Modus's ability to continue as a going concern," citing a "lack of current revenues, recurring losses from operations and net capital deficiency."

No revenue. Recurring losses. Capital deficiency. And the instrument attached to this language was a shelf registration asking the Securities and Exchange Commission for permission to sell up to $250 million in stock and warrants. Five days before the filing, Alpha Modus's shares had closed at 46 cents. Its 10.2 million publicly traded shares were worth, at market price, roughly $4.7 million. The shelf was more than fifty times that figure.

The gap between the two passages — between vision and viability — might have read as mere micro-cap melodrama, except for this: in the four and a half months before filing the prospectus, Alpha Modus had sued at least twenty companies in federal court for patent infringement. Among the defendants: Lowe's, Kroger, 7-Eleven, H&M, and the Spanish parent of Zara.

What Plaintext found: Three patent assertion entities that appear to be non-practicing — organizations that hold and assert patents rather than sell products — have filed at least 31 patent infringement suits against 28 AI and retail technology companies since late August 2025. The campaigns span seven federal districts and target defendants from Kroger, with roughly $150 billion in annual revenue, to venture-backed startups with a few dozen employees. Each plaintiff carved out a largely distinct slice of the AI industry — retail analytics, industrial robotics, imaging software — though with some overlap. We found no reporting that connected the three campaigns across venues. Individual case filings appeared in legal databases, but no outlet identified the pattern. The entire wave unfolded behind the more visible fight over AI training data — the copyright litigation that consumed the industry's attention and generated hundreds of articles. This is the other AI intellectual property front. It targets companies that build and deploy AI products, and it could quietly drain more from small and mid-market companies than the headline cases.

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From SPAC to Patent Plaintiff

Alpha Modus's path to becoming the most prolific AI patent plaintiff in the country began fourteen months before its first lawsuit. On December 13, 2024, a special-purpose acquisition company called Insight Acquisition Corp. completed a merger with Alpha Modus Corp., a private Florida firm. The de-SPAC took the company public on the Nasdaq under the ticker AMOD. Alpha Modus's own business description, per the January 2026 S-3, focused on an "IP-powered innovation" model "leveraging its diverse patent portfolio." The SEC classifies the company under SIC code 6794: Patent Owners and Lessors — a designation that says more about the business model than any prospectus language.

Eight and a half months after going public, the lawsuits started.

The first target was Cooler Screens, a Chicago startup known for the digital displays it installs inside grocery-store and convenience-store cooler doors — screens that show advertisements when you reach for a Gatorade. Alpha Modus sued Cooler Screens on August 21, 2025, in the Northern District of Illinois. Four days later, it sued A2Z Cust2Mate Solutions, an Israeli company that makes AI-powered smart shopping carts, in the Eastern District of Texas. Then Kroger, on August 29. Then Creative Realities, a digital signage firm, sued twice — on September 3 and September 4, in two separate complaints. By the end of November, Alpha Modus had filed at least twenty cases.

The defendant list reveals a deliberate strategy. Alpha Modus sued up and down the retail technology supply chain — from Fortune 500 retailers deploying AI in their stores (Lowe's, Kroger, 7-Eleven, H&M, Zara's parent Industria de Diseño Textil) to the vendors selling them the tools (RetailNext, Stratacache, Sensormatic Electronics) to the startups building the underlying technology (Cooler Screens, A2Z Cust2Mate, Navori). The approach is a recognized one in the patent assertion world. If a vendor settles, the licensing cost flows through to the retailer as a price increase. If a retailer licenses, it validates the patents for claims against the vendor's other customers. Alpha Modus sued both layers at once.

For a company with no revenue and auditors questioning its viability, the logic is straightforward: cast a wide net and hope enough defendants conclude that settling is cheaper than fighting. Industry surveys peg median defense costs through trial in the low millions for cases with less than $10 million at stake. A common boardroom calculation: a mid-six-figure settlement versus a seven-figure defense spend. Many companies choose the six figures.

The majority of Alpha Modus's cases — at least fourteen — landed in the Eastern District of Texas, a jurisdiction long favored by patent plaintiffs, where many cases are assigned to Judge Rodney Gilstrap. We did not retrieve individual docket pages for all of Alpha Modus's cases, so we have not confirmed every judge assignment. But the venue itself is the signal. Filing in Marshall or Tyler, Texas, when your company is headquartered in Cornelius, North Carolina, and your defendants are scattered across the country, is a choice — one that patent plaintiffs have been making for two decades.

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Nine Days, Three Entities

Alpha Modus had company.

On August 25 — the same day Alpha Modus filed against A2Z Cust2Mate in Texas — a previously unknown entity called the Artificial Intelligence Industry Association filed a patent suit in Northern California against Osaro, a startup that builds robotic picking systems for e-commerce warehouses. AIIA had no public web presence, no SEC filings, and no litigation history in federal court before that day. Its name sounds like a trade group. It is not.

Over the next five months, AIIA filed at least eight more cases against companies building AI and software products: Elementary Robotics, which makes computer vision inspection systems for manufacturing; Parallel Domain, which generates synthetic training data for autonomous vehicles; Topaz Labs, which makes AI-powered photo and video enhancement tools; Ceres AI, which applies aerial imaging and machine learning to agriculture; and Fanuc America, the U.S. arm of one of the world's largest industrial robot manufacturers. That Fanuc case, filed January 27, 2026 — the most recent in the campaign — represented a significant escalation. Fanuc's Japanese parent is a titan of industrial automation, with a global footprint spanning auto manufacturing and electronics. It has the resources to fight.

A third entity, the Artificial Intelligence Imaging Association, materialized on September 2, filing against MVision AI, a medical imaging startup focused on radiation oncology, in the Middle District of Florida. AIIA Imaging subsequently sued MVision a second time, in the Western District of Texas, and filed a third suit against Skylum Software — the company behind the Luminar photo editor — in the Southern District of New York.

Three entities, launched within nine days of each other, each targeting a largely distinct vertical: Alpha Modus focused on retail intelligence, AIIA on a mix of robotics and AI software, AIIA Imaging on medical and consumer imaging. The segmentation was not airtight — both AIIA and AIIA Imaging sued companies in the photo-editing space, with AIIA targeting Topaz Labs and Exposure Software while AIIA Imaging targeted Skylum. But the overall pattern suggests at minimum a division of labor across the AI industry.

Public dockets don't disclose ownership or funding, and Plaintext has not identified common officers, registered agents, or legal counsel linking the entities. State corporate registry searches and a review of the actual complaints — which list the attorneys of record — could confirm or rule out a connection. That research is ongoing. What the public record shows is timing: all three entities filed their first suits between August 21 and September 2, 2025. None had any prior litigation history. And then, suddenly, 31 cases.

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The Price of Being Sued

For Lowe's, which generates roughly $97 billion in annual revenue, a patent lawsuit is a line item. For Osaro, it can reshape the company.

Osaro builds robotic systems that pick and sort items in warehouses — technology that e-commerce has made essential. It's the kind of company that operates on venture capital and a finite runway, racing to reach profitability before the money runs out. Industry surveys place typical patent defense costs in the low- to mid-seven figures, depending on the case's complexity and how far it proceeds. Those are industry-wide medians, not figures specific to these cases. But the direction is clear. For a growth-stage company burning through twelve to eighteen months of runway, even the low end of that range represents capital budgeted for engineering, not lawyers.

The costs are not only financial. When a patent suit arrives, the CEO and general counsel — if the company has one — spend days reviewing the complaint and retaining outside litigation counsel, at rates that at major firms run into hundreds or even over a thousand dollars an hour. Engineers who built the accused products get pulled into discovery and depositions. Board meetings shift from product roadmaps to settlement math. Venture capital firms conducting due diligence on the company's next funding round must now account for the litigation as a risk factor. Some investors, wary of open-ended legal exposure, simply walk away.

Plaintext reached out to Osaro, Parallel Domain, Elementary Robotics, RetailNext, and Lowe's for comment on the litigation. None responded by publication. Alpha Modus did not respond to detailed questions about its litigation campaign, shelf registration, or financing strategy. Counsel for AIIA and AIIA Imaging could not be identified from publicly available docket summaries; identifying the attorneys of record requires purchasing the complaints from PACER.

The silence is typical. Companies facing patent suits rarely publicize them. For public companies, the cases may not yet be material enough to disclose. For startups, publicity can spook investors and customers. A campaign that has already generated at least 31 federal lawsuits proceeds in something close to obscurity — in part because the people best positioned to describe it have every incentive to stay quiet.

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Twenty-Nine Days

Not every target absorbed the lawsuit in silence.

On September 23, 2025 — twenty-nine days after AIIA filed its first complaint — Plus One Robotics, a San Antonio–based warehouse robotics company, filed a counter-suit against the Artificial Intelligence Industry Association in the Western District of Texas. The case is the only known instance of a defendant in these campaigns going on offense.

Counter-suits in patent cases are expensive and uncommon, especially for small companies. Filing one roughly doubles the legal cost. A defendant that files back is usually signaling something specific: either it believes the asserted patents are invalid and wants to prove it in court, or it suspects the litigation itself is illegitimate — filed not to vindicate genuine intellectual property, but to extract settlements through the threat of costly defense.

Plaintext did not purchase Plus One's countersuit from PACER, so we cannot report the specific allegations or claims it asserts. But the procedural significance is substantial regardless. Offensive litigation triggers discovery — the process by which each side can compel the other to produce documents, communications, corporate records, and financial information. If the case proceeds past initial motions, Plus One's attorneys could gain access to AIIA's formation documents, patent acquisition history, funding sources, and any communications with the other entities in the campaign. That is the kind of information that would confirm or disprove whether these three plaintiffs are truly independent or part of a coordinated operation.

As of mid-February 2026, no scheduling order or discovery deadline for the Plus One case appeared in the publicly available docket information on CourtListener. The case is early. But it has a clock, and if AIIA doesn't settle — thereby ending the discovery threat — the counter-suit could become the most consequential proceeding in the entire campaign.

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A $250 Million Bet on Litigation

Return to that January 7 shelf registration. The $250 million figure is extraordinary not just relative to Alpha Modus's float, but in what it reveals about the company's assumptions.

When Alpha Modus went public through the de-SPAC in December 2024, its stock initially traded above a dollar. By mid-November 2025, the S-3 pegged a reference price of $1.07 per share, putting the value of shares held by non-affiliates at roughly $10.9 million. By January 2, 2026, five days before the shelf was filed, shares had fallen to 46 cents — a 57 percent decline in under two months, reducing the market value of that float to about $4.7 million. The shelf the company was requesting — $250 million — was twenty-three times the S-3 reference value and more than fifty times the January market value.

A shelf registration does not mean a company has raised money. It means the company has asked for permission to raise money over time, without filing a new prospectus for each transaction. But the timing — four months into a twenty-lawsuit campaign, with the stock in free fall and auditors questioning the company's viability — narrows the possible interpretations. Either Alpha Modus anticipated that patent settlements would generate enough revenue to make the securities attractive to buyers, or it needed the shelf as a bridge to raise cash while waiting for settlement checks that hadn't arrived. Either way, the shelf confirms what the SIC code and the prospectus language already suggest: patent assertion is not a side project. It is the core business model, and the company itself frames it that way.

Alpha Modus's third-quarter 10-Q, filed in mid-November 2025, covers the period through September 30 — capturing the first five weeks of the litigation campaign. The next quarterly filing, covering the fourth quarter of 2025 when the majority of the twenty suits were pending, is due by mid-May 2026. That filing will show whether any settlements materialized. If the revenue line reads zero, the going-concern warning starts to look less like boilerplate and more like a countdown.

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The Copyright Shadow

How did 31 patent lawsuits against household names go unreported?

Start with what did get covered. When The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright in December 2023, the story generated more than a hundred articles within weeks. High-profile copyright settlements involving AI companies in 2025 and 2026 produced dozens more. The trade-secret dispute between xAI and OpenAI drew wide coverage in legal and tech press. The AI intellectual property debate, as it exists in public discourse, is almost entirely about copyright — whether AI companies can train on someone else's work.

Patent cases exist in a different information ecosystem. The complaints are dense with technical claims. They live behind PACER's paywall. The plaintiffs are obscure, and in most of these cases, the defendants are too. The Eastern District of Texas, where hundreds of patent suits land each year, doesn't distinguish one more patent complaint from the baseline noise. And no individual case in this campaign — Alpha Modus v. Navori SA, or AIIA v. Ceres AI — looks like a story on its own. You have to search systematically, across entities and districts, to see the pattern.

Plaintext searched Law360, Bloomberg Law, Law.com, The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, The Verge, Ars Technica, Wired, VentureBeat, the ABA Journal, Above the Law, and The Information on February 15, 2026. We searched for the three entity names, for combinations of "patent" with the defendant names, and for general terms like "PAE" and "patent troll" and "AI" and "2025." We found no reporting that connected the three campaigns or identified the pattern. A Law.com year-end roundup published February 4, 2026 — "2025's Five Biggest AI-Related Developments in IP Law" — made no mention of these campaigns. It is possible that paywalled docket-monitoring services flagged individual cases for subscribers, and it is possible that coverage appeared in sources we didn't check. But the gap between the attention paid to AI copyright cases and AI patent cases is real: hundreds of articles about training data, none that we could find about a coordinated patent campaign targeting the companies building and deploying AI in the physical world.

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What the Public Record Can and Cannot Show

To understand the scope of the threat, start with what the dockets don't reveal.

The most important unknown: What patents are being asserted? Without purchasing the actual complaints from PACER — roughly 31 filings — the specific patent numbers, claim language, and scope of the allegations remain unknown. Broad patents covering foundational AI techniques like computer vision or behavioral analytics would threaten far more companies than those already sued. Narrow patents covering specific implementations would limit the campaign's reach. The distinction between a patent that claims any system using a camera to track shopper behavior and one that claims a particular algorithm for correlating gaze direction with purchase intent is the difference between an industry-wide threat and a localized nuisance.

The corporate relationship among the three entities is equally opaque. Whether AIIA and AIIA Imaging share ownership, legal counsel, or funding sources with each other — or with Alpha Modus — cannot be determined from public dockets alone. The near-simultaneous launch in late August 2025 and the largely divided vertical targeting are suggestive, but circumstantial. Corporate registry searches (which Plaintext has not yet conducted) and complaint reviews (which would reveal attorneys of record) could confirm or disprove a link.

Then there is the question of settlements. In patent litigation, early resolutions are common and almost always confidential. If cases begin disappearing from dockets through voluntary dismissal — typically a sign that a deal has been reached — it would confirm that the economics are working for the plaintiffs. No dismissals appeared in publicly available docket information as of mid-February 2026. But the cases are young. The first suits are barely six months old.

What the public record does show, with certainty, is this: Before August 2025, searches for AIIA and AIIA Imaging on CourtListener returned zero results. General searches for AI and robotics patent cases in the twelve months prior — August 2024 through August 2025 — turned up roughly forty results, but these mostly involved operating companies suing other operating companies: Perceptive Automata v. Tesla, Neural AI v. NVIDIA. We searched by entity name, by technology keywords, and by court, filtering for patent cases. We did not identify a coordinated campaign by non-practicing entities of comparable scale in that period. Then three entities appeared, nearly simultaneously, and filed 31 suits in five months. Whatever triggered the wave, it was not gradual.

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The Next Filing

The next inflection point arrives in mid-May 2026, when Alpha Modus's fourth-quarter 10-Q is due. That filing will show whether the company's twenty lawsuits generated any revenue — from settlements, licenses, or otherwise — during the campaign's first five months. A zero would sharpen the tension between the $250 million shelf and the auditors' doubt. A meaningful number would validate the model and all but guarantee an expansion.

Meanwhile, the campaign may already be accelerating. AIIA's most recent case — against Fanuc America, filed in Northern California on January 27 — came five months after the first wave. If AIIA is willing to take on a defendant with the resources and litigation infrastructure of a major Japanese industrial conglomerate, the campaign is not winding down.

In San Antonio, Plus One Robotics' counter-suit sits on the docket in the Western District of Texas. If the case proceeds past initial motions, it has the potential to pry open AIIA's corporate records — patent acquisition history, funding sources, internal communications. That prospect makes it the most consequential case in the campaign, and the one most worth watching. If AIIA settles to make it go away, it will avoid disclosure but signal vulnerability. If the case continues, the next scheduling order will set the clock on the first real transparency this campaign has faced.

And in Chicago, the case that started it all — Alpha Modus v. Cooler Screens, filed August 21, a lawsuit over the digital advertising screens inside the cooler doors at your corner store — remains open. Four days after suing Cooler Screens, Alpha Modus filed again. Then again. Then again. Twenty times, in four months, across the country. A company with no revenue and a going-concern warning, positioning patent assertion as its primary path to revenue — betting that its intellectual property can generate more than its operating business ever did.

The first quarterly filing that covers the campaign's results is sixty days away. The number on the revenue line will say what the dockets cannot.

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Plaintext will continue monitoring docket activity across all 31 cases and will report on Alpha Modus's Q4 2025 financial results when filed. If you are a defendant, attorney, or investor involved in any of these cases and would like to speak with a reporter, contact tips@plaintext.com.