USPTO rescinds the 2024 inventorship guidance and treats artificial intelligence as a tool only

2025-11-28USPTO

Revised Inventorship Guidance for AI-Assisted Inventions, 90 Fed. Reg. 54636 (Nov. 28, 2025), rescinding 89 Fed. Reg. 10043 (Feb. 13, 2024)

The USPTO withdrew its February 2024 guidance on artificial-intelligence-assisted inventions and replaced it with guidance treating artificial intelligence systems as tools rather than as candidate joint inventors. The Office stated that the Pannu joint-inventorship factors apply only among natural persons and cannot be extended to an artificial intelligence system, and directed examiners to apply the ordinary inventorship standard without a separate pathway for applications involving artificial intelligence.

What it changesThaler v. Vidal still controls: every named inventor must be a natural person. The practical change is that inventorship questionnaires no longer need a separate significant-contribution analysis for the model itself; they need a record of which human made the conception decisions the claims rest on.

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Burbage Law is the practice of Jon Burbage, a registered patent attorney. 342 United States patents have issued from applications he wrote; the full list is on the Patents page. More about Jon Burbage.

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