The USPTO has spent 2026 running a pilot that most patent owners have never opted into, because it is not possible to opt in or out. Under the PCT Informed Examination Request (PIER) Pilot Program, announced at 91 FR 17949 on 9 April 2026 under Docket No. PTO-P-2026-0199 and signed by Director John A. Squires, the Office picks unexamined national stage applications and issues a requirement for information that asks the applicant one question: having now read the international phase work products in your own file, do you actually want this examined? The notice says selection runs from 9 April 2026 until 9 April 2027, that the Office may extend it, and that it may terminate it at its sole discretion. Selection reaches only applications that entered the national stage under 35 U.S.C. 371; filings under 35 U.S.C. 111(a), including plant, design and reissue applications, are excluded. Critically, the notice states the Office will not grant any petition to participate, to abstain, or to be removed.
The mechanics are where the risk sits. The requirement is issued under 37 CFR 1.105 and, as the notice makes explicit, it is an Office action under 35 U.S.C. 132 — just not a first action on the merits. It sets a two-month period for reply, extendible up to six months under 37 CFR 1.136(a) and capped there by 35 U.S.C. 133. The reply must be made on form PTO/SB/478 with exactly one box selected: proceed with examination (optionally with a preliminary amendment under 37 CFR 1.115), delay examination for 12 months, or expressly abandon under 37 CFR 1.138. Two boxes is an incomplete reply. No reply at all is abandonment. Writing to the US practitioner in IPWatchdog on 8 November, Keith Murphy and Koichiro Nakamura of Cantor Colburn called the programme a set of risks and costs with little upside for applicants, and noted that checking the “express request to begin national examination procedures” box on Form PTO-1390 at entry does nothing to keep an application out of the pool.
A letter that is not a rejection still carries an abandonment date
This is the operational trap, and it is a docketing problem before it is a strategy problem. A PIER requirement does not look like an Office action in the way a non-final rejection does: there is nothing to argue, no claim to amend, no art to distinguish. It is a form with three checkboxes. But it runs a two-month shortened statutory period, and under Part V of the notice a failure to timely file a complete, properly signed PTO/SB/478 results in abandonment.
Then the notice closes the escape hatch. It points to MPEP 711.03(c), subsection II.C, for the proposition that where an applicant deliberately permits an application to become abandoned, that is a deliberately chosen course of action and the resulting delay cannot be “unintentional” within the meaning of 37 CFR 1.137. Read in context, the Office is signalling that it will not treat a decision to let a PIER letter lapse as revivable. For in-house teams, that means the letter cannot be triaged as low priority correspondence on the view that a petition to revive will clean it up later. It belongs in the same bucket as a final rejection in your patent docketing system: a hard date, an owner, a reminder chain, and an escalation if nobody has answered by week six.
The term you lose on the way through
Two patent term adjustment consequences are written into the notice and neither is obvious from the form. First, the mailing of the 37 CFR 1.105 requirement is treated as the date on which the Office met the requirement of 35 U.S.C. 154(b)(1)(A)(i) and 37 CFR 1.702(a)(1) — the obligation to act within 14 months of the application date. A requirement for information that contains no examination on the merits therefore stops the A-delay clock. Second, if you elect the 12-month delay, the Office will treat the request as a failure to engage in reasonable efforts to conclude prosecution under 35 U.S.C. 154(b)(2)(C)(i) and (iii) and 37 CFR 1.704(c), so the delay period is charged against you.
The delay option also has no exit. The notice states that once a request to delay has been approved the applicant will not be permitted to terminate the delay period early; the application is docketed for examination only after 12 months from the date the request was received. So the honest comparison is not “free time versus paid suspension under 37 CFR 1.103” — the fee saving is real, but you are buying a year of waiting that cannot be cancelled when the licensing conversation you were waiting on closes in month four, paying for it in term, and still facing an unpredictable queue at the end of it.
Abandoning in reply does not get your money back
The option that looks like a cost saving mostly is not. Because the requirement for information is an action under 35 U.S.C. 132, the notice confirms that express abandonment under 37 CFR 1.138(d) to obtain a refund of the search and excess claims fees is unavailable. In other words, by the time the PIER letter arrives, the fees you might have recovered by walking away early are already spent. A decision to drop a US national stage case on the strength of a hostile written opinion is worth far more if it is taken before entry than if it is taken in response to this letter.
There is also a signature trap for outside counsel. Under 37 CFR 1.138(b), a registered practitioner acting in a representative capacity is not authorised to sign an express abandonment except when filing a continuing application. The notice spells out the consequence: the only time the Office will accept a PTO/SB/478 with the express abandonment box selected and signed by someone acting in a representative capacity is where a separate letter of express abandonment is filed indicating abandonment in favour of a continuing application. Otherwise the form must be signed by the practitioner of record or by a non-juristic applicant under 37 CFR 1.33(b)(1) or (b)(3). A form signed by the wrong person is an incomplete reply, and the clock keeps running. And if abandonment is meant to keep the application unpublished, the petition under 37 CFR 1.138(c) must go in as a separate request such as form PTO/AIA/24A, and generally will not stop publication unless it is recognised more than four weeks before the projected publication date.
Bypass continuations avoid the programme, at a price
Because PIER selection reaches only applications that entered under 35 U.S.C. 371, a filing route exists around it. As Murphy and Nakamura point out, applicants can file a bypass continuation under 35 U.S.C. 111(a) claiming priority to the PCT application instead of entering the national stage, and such applications are outside the selection pool. Their article puts numbers on the trade-off: where the USPTO was the International Searching Authority, the $770 search fee is waived for a national stage entry but not for a bypass continuation, and where another authority searched the case but its report was furnished to the USPTO at filing, the search fee is discounted to $580 for a national stage entry and not for the bypass route.
That is the real decision this pilot forces, and it should be made at the 30-month diary entry rather than when a letter arrives. Both routes have been on the menu for years for other reasons — claim reformatting, continuation chains, timing. PIER adds a new line to the comparison: the §371 route is cheaper on official fees and now carries a random chance of a two-month response obligation with term consequences and no refund, while the §111(a) route costs more up front and is immune.
The written opinion in your file is now a decision document
The premise of the pilot is that the applicant has read the International Search Report and the written opinion or International Preliminary Report on Patentability already in the file, and has formed a view. In practice many national stage cases are entered as portfolio housekeeping, with the written opinion skimmed once at the international stage and never revisited. The Office has turned that document into the basis of a formal election.
The practical response is to pull the ISR and the WO/ISA forward in the workflow and to treat a negative opinion as a live question on whether the US case earns its place. Where the citations in the written opinion look serious enough to drive that call, the input needed is a real read of the art rather than a glance at the citation categories under WIPO Standard ST.14 — which is the point of a focused prior art search on the cited references before the two months run. One related detail from the notice is worth banking while you are in the file: references cited in the international phase are considered by the examiner, but they are only printed on the resulting patent if the applicant cites them on an information disclosure statement complying with 37 CFR 1.97 and 1.98.
What to put in place this week
Four things. Give your US counsel blanket standing instructions on how to answer a PIER requirement — Murphy and Nakamura recommend a default election to proceed — so that no case drifts toward abandonment while an instruction is chased. Add a docket code for a 37 CFR 1.105 PIER requirement, with a two-month base date and an internal deadline well inside it, because the extension under 37 CFR 1.136(a) is paid and capped at six months. Check, for every pending §371 case that has cleared pre-examination processing, whether anyone would answer the letter if it arrived tomorrow and who is authorised to sign it. And note what is not a reply: the notice states that a response under 37 CFR 1.105(a)(3) saying the required information is unknown or not readily available is not a proper reply, because an applicant who has not decided has the delay option available. “We are still thinking about it” is not on the form.
The pilot is scheduled to close on 9 April 2027, with the Office reserving the right to extend it and to publish any termination on its website. Until then, every unexamined US national stage case in a portfolio carries a small random probability of a hard two-month deadline that nobody applied for.