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The United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has issued updated guidance on determining inventorship for artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted inventions (the “Updated Guidance”), effective November 28, 2025. The Updated Guidance affirms that only natural persons can be inventors. It also rescinds the PTO's prior guidance of February 13, 2024, and establishes a legal standard for inventorship that applies to all inventions, regardless of AI involvement.
The Updated Guidance, citing Thaler v. Vidal, 43 F.4th 1207 (Fed. Cir. 2022), affirms that only natural persons can be inventors. It explains that AI, including generative AI and other computational models, is an instrument used by human inventors, analogous to laboratory equipment or other tools that assist in the inventive process. As with inventors using laboratory equipment without the equipment becoming a joint inventor, inventors can use AI in conceiving of an invention without the AI becoming a joint inventor.
The previous guidance of February 13, 2024, explained that the Pannu factors, articulated in Pannu v. Iolab Corp., 155 F.3d 1344, 1349 (Fed. Cir. 1998), should apply when determining whether a human made “significant contributions” to the invention to be listed as an inventor when AI was involved. The Updated Guidance explains that the Pannu factors only apply when determining whether multiple natural persons qualify as joint inventors. More pointedly, because “AI systems are not persons and therefore cannot be ‘joint inventors', there is no joint inventorship question to analyze”. Consequently, the Updated Guidance explains that the Pannu factors do not apply to contributions made by AI in assisting a human inventor.
The Updated Guidance reiterates that the use of AI in the development process does not change the joint inventorship analysis among multiple natural persons. This includes the Pannu factors, where to be considered an inventor, a person must have: (1) contributed in some significant manner to the conception of the invention; (2) made a contribution to the claimed invention that is not insignificant in quality, when that contribution is measured against the dimension of the full invention; and (3) did more than merely explain well-known concepts and/or the current state of the art.
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