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The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued Revised Inventorship Guidance for AI‑Assisted Inventions (reference: Federal Register Doc. 2025‑21457, published Nov. 28, 2025). The guidance has reiterated that, in the US, only natural persons (i.e., humans) can be named as inventors, and thus an AI system cannot be named as an inventor on a patent application or issued patent. The guidance also states that, contrary to the guidance issued in 2024, the Pannu joint‑inventorship factors – which are used when determining if multiple natural persons qualify as joint inventors – do not apply to human/AI cases because AI systems are not persons, and so cannot legally be a joint inventor.
The question of inventorship at the USPTO is based on the notion of conception, which is 'the formation, by a natural person, of a definite and permanent idea of the complete and operative invention'. Once an invention has been conceived, the steps required to reduce it to practice do not make someone an inventor.
When an invention is created with the assistance of AI, the same conception standard applies: a natural person is an inventor if they formed a definite and permanent idea of the claimed invention. Under US practice, inventors may use the services, ideas, and aid of others without those sources becoming co-inventors, and the new guidance clarifies that AI systems are to be thought of simply as tools, analogous to lab equipment or computer software. While AI systems may generate ideas, they remain tools that are used by the human inventor who conceived the claimed invention. This revised guidance clarifies the threshold for establishing human inventorship for AI-assisted inventions: a person is an inventor if they conceived the invention, independent of whether AI systems were used.
In the UK, the inventor is the 'actual deviser' of the invention, and only humans can be named as inventors. Similarly, at the European Patent Office (EPO), only humans can be inventors, and while AI tools may contribute, the inventor must be a human who contributed to a technical solution forming the invention, which may be more difficult to establish when AI systems are used.
Therefore, while the US, the UK, and the EPO all agree that only humans can be named as an inventor on patents or patent applications, the newly issued guidance in the US clarifies that the test for determining if a human is an inventor is the same, whether or not AI systems are used.
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