Notcooltobully: Samsung's filed an AI-powered ad block patent

Thursday, July 31, 2025

Samsung has filed a patent for an ad blocking system that’s very different to how most ad blockers work today.

how it works:

Instead of filter lists (the backbone of popular blockers like uBO, AdGuard, etc.), Samsung’s proposal is all about AI: a large language model is trained to recognize ads directly, and then compressed so it can run locally on your device (the patent mentions a 32MB neural net).
It’s not just for browsers. in theory, this could work across Samsung’s apps and interface (One UI), potentially blocking ads everywhere, not just in your web browser.
Gesture-based input: users swipe away ads they don’t like. If enough people do the same thing, future models block those ads for everyone. If only you block it, it remains private and local.
No filter updates: the AI model handles ad recognition, so there’s no lag between new ad formats and blocking effectiveness.
Privacy: crowdsourced blocking uses differential privacy—personal data is kept on-device, aggregate data is anonymized.
The system can block at the network level or hide ads visually, by analyzing network data, page structure, and user feedback.

Notcooltobully