The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has fundamentally reframed how the patent system views generative AI, positioning it as equivalent to other tools in inventors’ toolkits rather than as a novel threat requiring entirely new rules. This shift reflects a pragmatic approach to patent law that acknowledges AI’s transformative role while maintaining human-centered inventorship standards.
The Core Ruling: AI Can’t Be an Inventor, But AI-Assisted Work Can Be Patented
The USPTO’s inventorship guidance for AI-assisted inventions establishes a clear distinction: while artificial intelligence systems cannot be listed as inventors, inventions created with AI assistance are fully eligible for patent protection. This guidance, effective since February 13, 2024, applies the same inventorship framework to AI-assisted innovations that already existed for traditional collaborative work.
The key requirement is straightforward—the natural person must contribute significantly to the invention, measured against established legal standards known as the Pannu factors.
What Counts as a “Significant Contribution”?
Under the USPTO framework, a human inventor must:
- Contribute in some significant manner to the conception or reduction to practice of the invention
- Make a contribution to the claimed invention that is not insignificant in quality
- Do more than merely explain well-known concepts or describe the current state of the art
Importantly, merely providing a problem to an AI system without further involvement, or simply recognizing AI output as valuable, does not qualify someone as an inventor. However, the way a person constructs prompts to elicit particular solutions from an AI system—or designs and trains AI systems for specific problems—can demonstrate significant contribution.
Patent Eligibility Standards Remain Unchanged
For AI inventions to qualify for protection, they must still meet traditional patentability requirements: novelty, non-obviousness, utility, and falling within recognized statutory categories like processes, machines, manufactures, or compositions of matter. The USPTO applies the same Alice/Mayo two-step test to AI inventions as it does to other technologies.
Implications for Inventors and Patent Practitioners
This guidance normalizes AI as a tool rather than treating it as a special case. Patent practitioners now have clarity that the inventorship inquiry should include questions about whether and how AI is being used in the invention creation process, but no new disclosure requirements have been instituted. The focus remains on the substantive human contribution to the inventive process.
The USPTO’s approach represents a middle ground—it acknowledges that AI-assisted inventions are not categorically unpatentable while maintaining that only natural persons can hold the legal status of inventor. For innovators leveraging generative AI tools, the message is clear: substantive human ingenuity remains the cornerstone of patentability.