Patent pledges – public commitments to limit the enforcement or other exploitation of one’s patent rights – are increasing in popularity in a range of market sectors from telecommunications and software to biopharma and green technology. Following initial work that sought to classify and understand patent pledges as a distinct category of firm behavior, the author and collaborators have identified a range of recent development in the evolution of patent pledges. These include increasing structural complexity and sophistication of patent pledges, a richer set of motivations leading firms to pledge patents, increased attention to the role that patent pledges play in innovation and on the governance of collective pledges, and a trend toward democratization and internationalization of pledge behavior. These trends were discussed at the Evolving Pledges Workshop in Washington DC in September 2017 and are summarized herein.