The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has sued Amazon in federal court, alleging that Amazon Web Services' data-security technology infringes patents held by the university. MIT filed the complaint on Friday, October 9, 2026, asking the court for an unspecified amount of monetary damages.
According to Reuters, MIT says AWS's physical unclonable function technology, which is used to create unique cryptographic keys, violates its patent rights. The case is docketed as Massachusetts Institute of Technology v. Amazon Web Services, Inc., No. 1:26-cv-14600, and is before the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, per court records.
Similar Patent Suit Against Microsoft
This is not MIT's first swing at a cloud computing giant over this technology. The university filed a similar lawsuit against Microsoft in Texas in May 2026, and that case remains ongoing, Reuters reports. The Microsoft suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, accused the company of infringing patents tied to physical unclonable function technology used to secure its cloud services, according to Law360.
MIT's complaint against Amazon alleges that AWS uses cloud-security technology supplied by Synopsys that infringes the university's physical unclonable function patents, per the lawsuit. Synopsys itself is not named as a defendant in the case. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment on the complaint by Monday, Reuters reported.
A Pattern of Costly Cloud Patent Fights
MIT's case lands against a backdrop of repeated patent litigation targeting cloud infrastructure providers. Companies building cloud-based software increasingly have to weigh the value of patent protection against trade-secret protection, according to a Henry Law analysis of a separate Amazon patent fight.
That earlier case, brought by data infrastructure company Kove, accused AWS products including Amazon S3 of infringing patents covering how data is managed across distributed networks. A jury ordered Amazon to pay Kove $525 million for patent infringement in April 2024, per the same analysis. Whether MIT's complaint against Amazon will follow a similar path through the courts remains to be seen, but the university's parallel case against Microsoft suggests it intends to pursue both disputes simultaneously.
