AI Legal Watch: December 2025

President Trump Signs Executive Order 'Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence'
Coleman Strine
On December 11, President Trump signed an Executive Order on "Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence" (the "Order"). The stated policy of the Order is to "sustain and enhance the United States' global AI dominance through a minimally burdensome national policy framework for AI." The Order comes amid an accelerating patchwork of state-level AI regulation and reflects a clear federal policy shift toward limiting state experimentation in favor of a uniform, deregulatory national approach. Primarily, the Order establishes a framework for identifying onerous state AI laws, challenging those laws through litigation, restricting funding for states that maintain onerous AI laws, and taking steps to federally preempt such laws. Based on the timelines provided in the Order, this process is expected to begin within the next 30 to 90 days.

Read more here.

Genesis Mission: White House Releases Executive Order to Accelerate Scientific Research
Ben Bafumi
On November 24, 2025, the White House issued an Executive Order (No. 14363, "Launching the Genesis Mission") directed to streamlining scientific research and discovery using artificial intelligence. This Order follows the White House's AI Action Plan—directed to accelerating AI innovation by, for example, creating world-class datasets and models.

The Genesis Mission aims to consolidate scientific research and development efforts from National Laboratories, research universities, and the private sector to create a collaborative, robust AI platform. Utilizing existing high-powered computing technology, the Order expressly directs the Department of Energy to develop an "integrated AI platform to harness Federal scientific datasets," which, in turn, will train AI models used to test new hypotheses and automate workflows. This platform, named the "American Science and Security Platform," will leverage national supercomputers and "cloud-based" computing environments, AI agents, predictive and simulation models, field or domain-specific models, proprietary and open-source datasets, and experimental production and manufacturing tools.

The Order tasks the Secretary of Energy with (1) identifying "a detailed list of at least 20" nationally-important scientific challenges within 60 days of the Order, (2) identifying computing resources available to support the Genesis Mission within 90 days of the Order, (3) identifying preliminary datasets and models and developing an implementation plan within 120 days of the Order, (4) reviewing experimentation, production, and manufacturing capabilities of participating research facilities and laboratories within 240 days of the Order, and (5) demonstrating that the American Science and Security Platform is operable within 270 days of the Order.

The White House is hopeful that the Genesis Mission will "accelerate scientific discovery, strengthen national security, secure energy dominance, enhance workforce productivity, and [ultimately] ... further[] America's technological dominance and global strategic leadership."

Open Source Models Rival Closed Source
Joe Cahill
Two significant open source AI models were released in the past month: Moonshot AI's Kimi K2 (November 6, 2025) andDeepSeek V3.2 (December 1, 2025), both achieving performance competitive with leading proprietary systems under permissive licenses. For businesses considering adoption, deployment architecture matters: self-hosting maximizes data sovereignty and minimizes third-party transmission risks but may place full compliance and liability responsibility on your organization, while using these models through third-party hosting providers introduces data confidentiality concerns — the FTC has previously cautioned that AI service providers maintain data appetites potentially at odds with customer confidentiality. On the regulatory front, no comprehensive federal law addresses open source AI specifically; the Trump administration's July 2025 AI Action Plan explicitly encourages open-source and open-weight model adoption, describing them as having "geostrategic value" and directing agencies to promote their use — representing the most favorable federal posture to date. However, state-level requirements are emerging: Colorado's AI Act (effective February 2026) imposes developer obligations for high-risk AI systems with no open source exemption. Businesses considering these tools should evaluate licensing terms, data governance practices, and the evolving compliance landscape carefully.

USPTO Issues Revised Guidance on Evaluating AI-Assisted Inventorship
Nick Palmieri
The USPTO has issued revised guidance on inventorship for AI-assisted inventions, rescinding its February 2024 policy and reaffirming a single, traditional standard: only natural persons can be inventors on U.S. patents and applications. AI systems—generative or otherwise—are treated as tools used by human inventors, with conception remaining the touchstone of invention. Where one person used AI, the question is whether that person conceived the claimed invention; where multiple people contributed, conventional joint inventorship principles (the so-called Pannu factors) apply among the human contributors. No special rules exist to evaluate AI-assisted inventorship.

The guidance also addresses priority and foreign filings: a U.S. application cannot claim priority to a filing that lists only a non-natural person as inventor. If a foreign or PCT filing lists both a human and a non-human inventor, the U.S. application should identify only the natural person(s), ensuring at least one common human inventor to support priority. While this will rarely arise given most jurisdictions' current positions, applicants should verify inventorship and adjust filings accordingly. Bottom line: the Office has withdrawn its 2024 framework and clarified that there is no AI-specific inventorship test—AI is a tool, and inventorship in the United States remains strictly human.

Read more here.

Quick Links
For additional insights on AI, check out Baker Botts' thought leadership in this area:

1. Canada Releases Accessibility Standard for Artificial Intelligence: Senior Associate Nick Palmieri breaks down the standard so companies (both inside and outside Canada) are aware of how to stay compliant.
2. AI Counsel Code: Stay up to date on all the artificial intelligence (AI) legal issues arising in the modern business frontier with host Maggie Welsh, Partner at Baker Botts and Co-Chair of the AI Practice Group. Our library of podcasts can be found here, and stay tuned for new episodes coming soon.

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