Company: ALGN
Filing Date: 2025-08-06
Form Type: 10-Q
Source: 0001097149-25-000064
Chunk: 116

Company: ALIGN TECHNOLOGY INC
Filing Date: 2025-08-06
Form: 10-Q
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 116
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 The use of AI technologies for developing products or services may adversely affect or preclude our intellectual property rights in such products or services, or may expose us to liability related to the infringement, misappropriation or other violation of third-party intellectual property. Further, particularly given the nascent stage of the technology, the use of AI can lead to unintended consequences, including the generation of outputs that appear correct but are factually inaccurate, misleading, or that result in unintended biases and discriminatory outcomes, or are otherwise flawed, which could harm our reputation and business and expose us to risks related to such inaccuracies or errors in these outputs.

Intellectual Property Risks

Our success depends in part on our proprietary technology, and if we fail to successfully obtain or enforce our IP rights, our competitive position may be harmed. 

Our success depends in part on our ability to maintain existing IP rights and obtain, maintain and enforce further IP protections for our products. Our inability to do so could harm our competitive position.

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We rely on our portfolio of issued and pending patent applications in the United States and other countries to protect a large part of our IP and our competitive position; however, these patents may not prevent third parties from producing competing products similar in design to ours if they are invalidated, held unenforceable, circumvented or otherwise limited in scope. Furthermore, our foreign patent protections may be more limited in geographic scope than those under U.S. patent and IP laws. 

Additionally, any of our patent applications may not result in an issued patent or the scope of the patent ultimately issued may be narrower than initially sought. We may not be afforded the protection of a patent if our currently pending or future patent filings do not result in the issuance of patents or we fail to timely apply for patent protection. We may not apply for a patent if our personnel fail to disclose or recognize new patentable ideas or innovations. We may choose not to file a foreign patent application if the limited protections provided by a foreign patent do not outweigh the costs to obtain it. Further, third parties may file patents or develop IP strategies that prevent or limit the effectiveness of our patents.

We also protect our IP through copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets and confidentiality obligations. We generally enter into confidentiality agreements with our employees, consultants and collaborative partners upon commencement of a relationship with us. However, despite the existence of these protections, we have experienced incidents in which our proprietary information has been misappropriated and believe it could be misappropriated in the future. If these agreements do not provide meaningful protection against