USPTO Issues Revised Inventorship Guidance for AI-Assisted Inventions: Key Takeaways for AI/ML Innovators

Background

On November 26, 2025, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) released a new Revised Inventorship Guidance¹ for AI-Assisted Inventions (hereafter “Guidance”), rescinding in full the USPTO’s February 2024 guidance² and replacing it with a clarified framework for evaluating inventorship when AI systems are used within the innovation process.

This new guidance arrives as AI/ML systems have taken on an increasingly central role in various industry sectors. The USPTO emphasizes that the same longstanding inventorship standards continue to apply, regardless of whether AI is used as part of the inventive process. Thus, AI remains a tool and not an inventor.

For companies operating in the AI/ML space, the revised guidance reaffirms a single legal standard for determining inventorship and eliminates the previously suggested “Pannu factor” analysis established in the February 2024 guidance for AI-assisted inventions.

What Has Changed?

1. February 2024 AI Inventorship Guidance Fully Rescinded

The USPTO explicitly rescinded its February 2024 guidance and the accompanying examples, thereby withdrawing the approach in the prior guidance that “relied on the application of the Pannu factors to AI-assisted inventions . . .”. The Guidance clarified that “Pannu factors only apply when determining whether multiple natural persons qualify as joint inventors” and is “inapplicable when only one natural person is involved in developing an invention with AI assistance” because AI systems cannot be joint inventors. Where a single human is involved, examiners must apply only the traditional conception test, focusing on whether that individual conceived the invention.

2. A Single Legal Standard Applies to All Inventions (regardless of whether the Invention was AI-assisted or Not)

The Guidance reiterates that the touchstone of inventorship is “conception”, a traditional standard long embedded in Federal Circuit precedent. To be an inventor, a natural person must have a “definite and permanent idea” of the claimed invention such that only ordinary skill is needed to reduce it to practice. An idea is not sufficiently formed if the putative inventor merely has a “general goal or research plan.” Conception requires “a specific, settled idea, a particular solution to the problem at hand.” Thus, the Guidance emphasizes that there is “no separate or modified standard for AI-assisted innovations”.

3. AI Systems Are Considered Tools Similar to Software, Labs, or Databases

The USPTO reaffirms that only natural persons can be inventors, consistent with Thaler v. Vidal³. The Guidance analogizes AI models to instruments such as “laboratory equipment, computer software, research databases, or any other tool that assists in the inventive process…” In those situations, an inventor may rely on the “services, ideas, and aid of others”, including AI systems, without those sources becoming co-inventors.

4. Joint Inventorship Still Follows Traditional Principles

Where multiple natural persons contribute to an AI-assisted invention, traditional joint-inventorship principles apply, including the Pannu factors. In such cases, each human contributor must demonstrate a significant contribution to the conception of at least one claim. The fact that AI tools were used “does not change the joint inventorship analysis among the human contributors.”

5. Inventorship on Patents including Benefit/ Priority Claims to Foreign Applications

If a foreign priority application names an AI tool (alone or as a joint inventor), a US patent application claiming priority to the foreign priority application cannot name an AI tool as an inventor. Only natural persons can be inventors on US applications or patents.

Accordingly, the Guidance reinforces that, even in an era of increasingly capable AI systems, inventorship remains grounded in traditional human conception, ensuring consistent application of long-standing patent principles to AI-assisted innovation.