Technology Law and Digital Law

In April 2017, if you had the latest technology, you were sporting the iPhone 7, and potentially grieving that, for the first time, your phone did not have a headphone jack. You were placing calls and downloading data on a 4G network—and that data use wasn’t attributable to TikTok, because the platform had not been developed yet. If you were using that iPhone 7 to track activity in the Ohio General Assembly, you also witnessed Ohio’s adoption of the Revised Uni-form Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (“RUFADAA”).

The U.S. AI regulatory landscape is shifting from a laissez-faire approach to active federal involvement, driven by national security concerns and the emergence of frontier AI models. Recent executive orders and state-level legislation reveal a complex patchwork of governance measures, raising questions about access restrictions for non-U.S. organizations and the balance between innovation and security. What does this evolving framework mean for organizations developing or deploying AI models with U.S. expo

Quick Answer: AI-assisted inventions use the same U.S. inventorship standard as other inventions, with only human beings eligible as inventors. Technology companies should document each person's conception of the claimed invention before drafting claims and approving inventor declarations. The USPTO imposes no general AI-use disclosure duty, but information material to patentability can still require disclosure. [2] Patent counsel should assess inventorship, disclosure, and eligibility separately before the company commits to a filing strategy.