To address the rapid increase in the utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) in creative endeavors, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued inventorship guidance for AI-assisted inventions on February 13, 2024. Perhaps out of haste to act, as well as a desire to strike a seemingly fair balance, the USPTO offered somewhat confusing guidelines that allowed a human to assert inventorship for any AI-assisted patent claim for which the human made “more than insignificant contribution.” This essentially treated AI as a potential joint inventor of a patent application, where each inventor can only make claim to those aspects of the invention that the relevant inventor significantly contributed to.
As of November 28, 2025, the USPTO has rescinded the previous guidance and now declares that the same legal standard for determining inventorship now applies to all inventions, regardless of whether AI was used in the creative process. This change is largely based on the presumption that whoever is listed on the patent application’s data sheet and those who sign the accompanying declarations are indeed the true inventors of the claimed subject matter.
Part of the rationale for this change is that AI is not a natural person, and so cannot be named as an inventor or joint inventor on a patent application, as has been held by the Federal Circuit. Additionally, the Federal Circuit has centered its inventorship inquiry around “conception,” characterizing conception as “the touchstone of inventorship.” The Federal Circuit has established that conception is “the formation in the mind of the inventor, of a definite and permanent idea of the complete and operative invention, as it is hereafter to be applied in practice” and that conception is complete when “the inventor has a specific, settled idea, a particular solution to the problem at hand, not just a general goal or research plan.”
The updated guidance is more straightforward than what was issued in February, and makes sense from the standpoint of treating AI as an inventive tool rather than a contributor. Critics say that the new standard puts too much trust in the hands of a patent applicant to be honest about what the applicant truly invented; however, this has always been true to a certain extent. Regardless, if inventorship is ever challenged in the case of an AI-assisted invention using the new guidelines, it will be interesting to see what the investigation process looks like.