AI and Inventorship: A Global Comparison of Machine Contributions to Patents

35 questions on AI and inventorship, answered and cited by the UpLaw editorial team.

• Can an AI system be named as an inventor on a patent?
• Can an inventorship error be corrected after a patent issues?
• Could widespread use of AI raise the obviousness bar and make AI-assisted inventions harder to patent?
• Did any court ever hold that an AI could be a named inventor?
• Do AI inventions face patent-eligibility problems under Section 101?
• Does patent-law conception attach to the problem or to the solution?
• How does Amgen v. Sanofi affect functionally claimed AI inventions?
• How much must a human contribute for an AI-assisted invention, and how does each major patent office treat it?
• How should companies draft and claim AI-assisted patents for cross-border filing?
• If a scientist only recognizes that an AI's output is valuable, is that enough to be an inventor?
• If I use a general-purpose AI tool to help develop an invention, can I still be the inventor?
• If no human qualifies as the inventor, who owns an AI-generated invention?
• If two companies use AI to reach the same invention, why might only one obtain a valid patent?
• In unpredictable arts like biotechnology, when is conception complete for an AI-generated candidate?
• Is every contributor to even one patent claim a co-inventor of the whole patent?
• Is routinely applying a known AI method to a known problem patentable at the EPO?
• Under the USPTO guidance, what kinds of human involvement do and do not count when inventing with AI?
• What are the Pannu factors for joint inventorship?
• What are the Wands factors for undue experimentation?
• What did the USPTO's 2024 guidance on AI-assisted inventions decide?
• What does the EPO's sufficiency-of-disclosure requirement demand for machine-learning inventions?
• What happens if inventorship is stated incorrectly on a patent?
• What is conception in patent law, and why does it mean an AI cannot be an inventor?
• What is DABUS, and why did it matter for patent law?
• What is technical character, and why does it matter for patenting AI in Europe?
• What is the biggest practical risk for a company doing AI-driven R&D?
• What is the difference between conception and reduction to practice?
• What is the difference between the headline question and the operative question in AI inventorship?
• What is the spectrum of human involvement in AI-assisted invention?
• What kinds of human contribution push an AI-assisted invention toward valid human inventorship?
• What records should a company keep to prove human inventorship of AI-assisted work?
• What written-description and enablement requirements apply to AI-assisted inventions?
• Why did South Africa grant a DABUS patent listing an AI as inventor?
• Why do critics object to applying the Pannu factors to AI, and what is the competing tool framing?
• Why not just amend the patent statutes to let AI be an inventor?