The independent claim is where the value lives, and in a battery patent the value is usually in how structure and safety are made inseparable. Rivian's grant US12651813B2, "Systems and methods for battery architecture" (issued June 9, 2026), carries a CPC list that tells the story before you read a single claim: H01M 50/581 (electric connections within a cell housing), H01M 10/425 (battery management for specific applications), and crucially B60L 3/0046 and B60L 3/04 — the electric-propulsion codes for preventing damage to components and for disconnecting a vehicle from its supply on a fault.

Separate the structural claim from the safety claim and you see the design intent. H01M 50/581 is about the physical architecture — how cells connect inside the housing. The B60L 3 codes are about what happens when something goes wrong — isolating the pack, cutting the supply, protecting the rest of the vehicle. A pack patent that classifies into both is claiming an architecture in which the safety behavior is a property of the structure, not a separate bolt-on circuit.

“Systems and methods for a battery architecture include a first fuse connected between a first battery cell and a second battery cell of a battery pack, and a second fuse connected between the second battery cell and a terminal of a charge port.”— U.S. Patent No. 12,651,813 source

This is novel where the integration is novel, and boilerplate where it is not. Plenty of prior art covers battery disconnection on fault, and plenty covers cell-housing connections. The defensible position in this grant is the specific combination — the way this particular architecture achieves the fault isolation — which the independent claim defines and the dependent claims fence in. Reading the abstract alone would tempt you to say "Rivian patented battery safety," which is exactly the overreach a claims teardown exists to prevent.

Why does an EV maker file structural-plus-safety battery IP rather than chemistry IP? Because the chemistry is increasingly bought from cell suppliers, while the pack architecture — how a manufacturer assembles, manages, and protects those cells — is where a vehicle company can still differentiate and defend. The IP-strategy signal is that Rivian is protecting the integration layer it controls, not the cell chemistry it does not.

The inventor list reads like a pack-engineering team, and the assignee is Rivian IP Holdings, LLC — the entity that holds the company's patents. For portfolio watchers, a grant assigned to the IP-holding entity rather than the operating company is the normal pattern for a position a company intends to keep and potentially enforce.

For the B60L class specifically, this grant is a reminder that "electric propulsion" patents are not only about motors and inverters. The safety subclasses — B60L 3/00 and its children — are filling with pack-architecture claims, and tracking which assignees concentrate there tells you who is treating battery integration as defensible IP rather than commodity assembly.