US patent applications filed per year, from USPTO's own Patent File Wrapper data
Applications Filed, by Year
Read the drop after 2020 as a coverage boundary, not a real decline.
2011-2020 is a complete ten-year bulk backfill, real volume, roughly 500,000-620,000
applications a year. 2021 onward is only a partial recent-years pull layered on top of
that backfill -- a few thousand applications a year, not the full filing count -- so the
line falls off a cliff exactly where complete coverage ends, not where filing activity
actually did. Full post-2020 coverage isn't loaded yet.