It will be recalled that on January 12, 2017 the USPTO published a Federal Register notice proposing to discontinue the Accelerated Examination program. I blogged about the Federal Register notice here in February of 2017. Members of the public filed comments in response to the Federal Register notice, as I discussed here in April of 2017. It is now October of 2017 and one might wonder, what happened to USPTO’s proposal to discontinue AE?
The answer is that nothing further has happened regarding USPTO’s proposal to discontinue AE. As of right now, AE is still available for use by applicants.