Hmmm, I think of prompts more like recipes than an algorithm. Similar in both regards, but to the layman, I think prompts are becoming as common practice in daily lives as recipes.
Recipes can be trade secrets but not IP.(Unless it's a super rare circumstance that proves uniqueness in a 'Food Science' way).
I surely hope no one can patent a prompt. That would be an annoying world to live in.
Algorithms are considered mathematics and not patentable in themselves. So even if prompts are seen as algorithms, they would not be patentable. Prompts would have the usual copyright protections.
I presume though that some specific prompts may satisfy the criteria for patentability.
TIL the "full" name of Alibaba Qwen is 通義千問(romanized as "Tongyi Qianwen", something along "knows all thousand questions"), of which the first half without the Chinese accent flags is romanized identically to "同意", meaning "same intents" or "agreed".
The Chinese version of the link says "通义 DeepResearch" in the title, so doesn't look like the "agree" to be the case. Completely agreed that it would be hilarious.
For people who don't read Chinese: the two 'yi' characters numpad0 mentioned (义 and 義) are the same, but written in different variants of Chinese script (Simplified/Traditional).
Recipes can be trade secrets but not IP.(Unless it's a super rare circumstance that proves uniqueness in a 'Food Science' way).
I surely hope no one can patent a prompt. That would be an annoying world to live in.