Protect Your Prompts: Protocols for IP Protection in LLM Applications

Abstract: With the rapid adoption of AI in the form of LLMs, the potential value of carefully engineered prompts has become significant. However, to realize this potential, prompts should be tradable on an open market. Since prompts are, at present, generally economically non-excludable, by virtue of their nature as text, no general competitive market has yet been established. This note discusses two protocols intended to provide protection of prompts, elevating their status as intellectual property, thus confirming the intellectual property rights of prompt engineers, and potentially supporting the flourishing of an open market for LLM prompts.