Posts in Artificial Intelligence

During a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property hearing on the Oversight of the U.S. Copyright Office on Tuesday, the intersection of copyright law, artificial intelligence, and executive branch interference were the key focuses. Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter provided critical updates on the Copyright Office’s modernization efforts. However, the hearing was punctuated by sharp rebukes from Democratic senators regarding former President Donald Trump’s recent attempts to assert executive control over the legislative branch agency.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is moving faster than traditional intellectual property (IP) strategy was designed to handle. The issue is not simply speed, although speed is certainly part of the problem. The deeper challenge is that AI innovation does not fit neatly into the legacy IP operating model. The assets, development cycles, regulatory environment, and commercial pathways are all different. And the value drivers are increasingly distributed across a spectrum of AI-related intangible domains, which include patents, trade secrets, data rights, software architecture, licensing models, and customer contracts.

Artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic talking point in patent practice. It is already being deployed by patent practitioners who understand a simple truth: AI is not a substitute for legal judgment, technical understanding, claim strategy, or client counseling. When implemented properly, AI is a force multiplier. It can compress timelines, improve consistency, reduce low-value friction, provide meaningful portfolio intelligence, and allow practitioners to spend more time on the work that actually requires professional expertise.

Welcome back to Cool AI Patents of the Month, where we highlight innovations that blur the line between science fiction and real-world engineering. Last month, we looked at AI-generated voice replicas, particularly in sports broadcasting. That concept is no longer theoretical. Major League Baseball players have reportedly entered into agreements enabling the creation of AI-driven digital avatars, allowing fans to engage directly with AI-generated versions of their favorite players. The takeaway is clear: personality and likeness are being productized. What once seemed futuristic is quickly becoming commercially relevant.

China was not the only actor being scrutinized today during a full Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, titled “Stealth Stealing: China’s Ongoing Theft of U.S. Innovation.”  Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) stood in for Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) as Chair and opened the hearing with a warning that, in addition to its blatant IP theft—which is estimated to cost the United States between $400 billion and $600 billion per year—China is more recently evolving from “imitator to innovator.” “The United States must overcome its historic and ideological views that China is unable to innovate,” Tillis said.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (UPSTO) announced today that it will be extending the Artificial Intelligence Search Automated Pilot Program (ASAP!) until June 1, 2026, to gather additional information and continue evaluating the program’s effectiveness. The Pilot was first announced in October 2025 and is meant to “evaluate the impact of sharing the results of an automated search prior to examination of an application.” 

For decades, management scholars and practitioners have grappled with what I call the “knowledge problem” in organizations—the stubborn difficulty of codifying and transferring expertise that resides in individual employees’ heads and habits. The most valuable organizational knowledge has always been tacit: the judgment calls, the contextual adaptations, the intuitive “feel” for how things get done. This knowledge walked out the door every evening and, more problematically, departed permanently when employees moved to competitors.

I have spent most of my professional career talking to patent practitioners about AI. For years, the conversation was about whether AI could be trusted, whether it was ready, and whether it would actually change how patent work gets done. I have watched the profession move from skepticism to curiosity to cautious adoption to – in 2026, for the first time – something that feels like acceptance. Questions that once provoked heated debate at conferences now feel almost trite. Nobody is really questioning whether AI has a place in patent practice anymore. The question that has replaced it is harder and more consequential:

While artificial intelligence (AI) companies have long maintained that copyright law poses a significant barrier to innovation, it’s getting harder for them to make that argument with a straight face. It was one thing to claim that early text-based chatbots were magical boxes that didn’t really depend on the copyrighted works used to train them—a pretense that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. But it’s quite another to make such claims when their systems are spitting out nearly perfect audiovisual renditions of Disney’s copyrighted characters, including Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story, Darth Vader from Star Wars, and Elsa from Frozen. That’s what Midjourney was doing when Disney sued it for infringement, and it’s also what OpenAI was doing when it struck a licensing deal with Disney.

If 2025 was the year every IP practice rushed to adopt AI, 2026 is the year the bill comes due — and a striking number of organizations are discovering they have no reliable way to read it. That was the organizing message from IPWatchdog LIVE 2026’s session: The Business Impact of AI in Practice: Calculating ROI in the AI Era.

Two recent federal district court decisions highlight the significant risks of sharing confidential information with a generative AI platform. In Trinidad v. OpenAI, the court dismissed the plaintiff’s trade secret claims under the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) because the plaintiff had voluntarily disclosed her allegedly proprietary frameworks to OpenAI while using ChatGPT to create them.Then, Judge Rakoff in United States v. Heppner held that documents created using publicly available generative AI are not protected by the attorney-client privilege—in part because communications memorialized through an AI platform are not confidential when the platform is not contractually bound to keep them secret.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced today that it is deploying an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that will finally solve the problem of patent eligibility analysis for examiners.

Since 2024, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued multiple AI-specific guidance documents on inventorship and subject matter eligibility, including the February 2024 Inventorship Guidance, the July 2024 Subject Matter Eligibility Update, and the November 2025 memo rescinding the February 2024 guidance. The pace of change has created a prosecution environment where the strategies that worked 18 months ago may actively undermine a patent application filed today. The inverse is true; applications drafted for today’s guidance may be structurally unprepared for the next revision.

Today, the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet conducted its first oversight hearing of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) during the second Trump Administration. The harshest lines of questioning for USPTO Director John Squires during the hearing were reserved for the agency’s notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) to reform rules of practice at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) as well as President Trump’s political influence at the agency. During the hearing, Squires also confirmed that the agency’s Patent Public Advisory Committee (PPAC) would soon be revived, following an offer to join PPAC extended last night to an undisclosed independent inventor.