On May 8, 2023, China’s National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) announced the revocation of licenses from 5 patent firms that filed a total of 30 780 abnormal (irregular) patent applications. This followed the announcement by CNIPA of sanctions against 7 firms that submitted in total more than 20,000 abnormal applications in March, 2023, although in the previous round there was only a revocation of licenses. Ongoing measures to combat abnormal applications, as well as measures to combat firms filing anomalous applications, may have caused a decrease in the number of utility model patents granted by 21,7% in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the same period last year.

In March CNIPA issued "Measures concerning the Regulation of Patent Applications", which provides the following definition of irregular behavior of a patent application:
The filed patent application contains fabricated, forged or modified inventions and creations, experimental data or technical effects, plagiarism, simple replacement, alteration of existing technology or existing samples, etc.;

Simultaneous or sequential filing of several patent applications that are clearly identical in content to the invention or essentially formed by simple combinations of various inventive features or elements;
The inventive content of numerous patent applications filed is mainly generated randomly using computer programs or other technologies;

In order to bypass surveillance measures against irregular patent applications, several patent applications that are essentially related to a specific organization, individual or address are scattered, filed sequentially, or in different places.