Posts in Artificial Intelligence

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director John Squires faced the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property Tuesday in an oversight hearing pushing for more information on several of the policy changes his administration has put in place. The hearing was the last over which its current Chairman, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), will preside.

Using one associate to prepare a claim construction chart and a second to check it is ordinary practice. In In re Brian E. Mitchell, Proceeding No. D2026-16, a patent attorney did the same with two generative AI tools: one to draft proposed claim constructions and a second to review them. Erroneous citations still reached the district court, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) Office of Enrollment and Discipline (OED) publicly reprimanded him for that.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is considering whether to impose new requirements on social-media companies, search engines and other online platforms whose advertising systems help impersonation scams reach consumers. In a September 24 Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM), the FTC requested information about platforms’ ad-optimization tools, financial incentives and efforts to prevent fraudulent advertisers from impersonating government agencies and legitimate businesses.

Recent discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) in legal practice tend to split into two opposing positions. One holds that junior attorneys should not meaningfully use AI because it will interfere with their development and prevent the formation of sound legal judgment. The other holds that AI will replace junior attorneys by eliminating the tasks they traditionally performed. Both positions rest on the same hidden assumption, which is that AI carries a direction of its own and that the profession’s task is to decide whether to accept it or resist it.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I spoke with Steve Caltrider, Vice President and Chief Intellectual Property Officer at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and a former General Patent Counsel at Eli Lilly. The discussion also examined patent quality and the role of examination. Caltrider’s view is that the best time to establish confidence in a patent is when the USPTO examines it—not years later through PTAB review or district court litigation, after investment decisions have already been made. He recognized the need for an error-correction mechanism, while cautioning that review should not become so extensive or unpredictable that it undermines the value of issued patents.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I spoke with Hilary Preston. Our conversation focused on the rapidly expanding AI data center ecosystem and the technology, infrastructure, and intellectual property risks emerging as billions of dollars flow into the sector.

Under 35 U.S.C. Section 256, one can only correct an inventorship error when the underlying facts and the affected parties can actually be identified, and when the statutory correction procedure can be completed. AI-assisted invention is starting to produce cases where none of that is possible: the development record shows plenty of human activity, but nothing in it establishes which person actually conceived the claimed invention. After Fortress Iron, LP v. Digger Specialties, Inc., No. 2024-2313 (Fed. Cir. Apr. 2, 2026, that kind of gap can turn into a validity problem, not just a paperwork one.

On September 1, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a Statement of Interest urging the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to hold that using copyrighted written works to train large language models (LLMs) is fair use, arguing that a contrary result would distort copyright law, suppress innovation and weaken U.S. competitiveness and national security. The statement was filed in reference to the multidistrict copyright litigation against OpenAI, although it specifically addressed claims by The New York Times and said its reasoning also applies to the related cases involving book authors and publishers.

Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against OpenAI OpCo, LLC, alleging that OpenAI’s artificial intelligence products and services infringe five AI patents covering personalized search, vector-based retrieval, recommendation systems and probabilistically controlled content generation. The complaint, filed August 31, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division, seeks a jury trial, monetary damages in the form of past and continuing royalties, enhanced damages for alleged willful infringement, and an injunction prohibiting continued infringement.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I spoke with Bijou Mgbojikwe, who serves as Senior Policy Counsel for the Entertainment Software Association. Our conversation examined the rapidly expanding intersection of artificial intelligence, intellectual property, and video game policy. The central challenge is that legislation often treats very different technologies and use cases as though they present the same risks. Mgbojikwe discussed the distinction between harmful deepfakes and digital replicas used in legitimate creative works, including films and video games. Those concepts can implicate different legal frameworks, including right-of-publicity laws, copyright, consumer-protection statutes, and the First Amendment. When lawmakers combine them through broad definitions that are intended to prevent fraud, for example, legislation aimed at deception or abuse can inadvertently reach fictional characters, realistic game environments, and other expressive content.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) Office of Enrollment and Discipline (OED) posted a final order to its website on August 27, publicly reprimanding a California patent attorney for submitting a claim construction chart containing citations that generative AI invented — not to case law, but to the intrinsic record of the patent in suit. In re Brian E. Mitchell, Proceeding No. D2026-16, resolves by settlement. Mitchell executed the agreement on July 20, 2026, and the OED Director on July 21. Tricia Choe, Associate General Counsel for General Law, approved it on July 27 on delegated authority from Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and USPTO Director John A. Squires.

An AI interaction can give rise to a Rule 56 disclosure obligation. Not because AI was involved, but because of the information the interaction put before you. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has already drawn that line. Its April 2024 guidance says there is no general obligation to disclose that an AI tool was used; the duty is implicated when the use rises to the level of materiality under Rule 56(b). The trigger is materiality, not AI.

On August 21, wikiHow, Inc. filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against OpenAI, Inc. and eight affiliated entities, alleging violations of the Copyright Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The lawsuit centers on claims that OpenAI copied wikiHow’s how-to articles without authorization to train ChatGPT and to ground its outputs, then used that copied content to generate substitutes for wikiHow’s website.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I spoke with Robert Plotkin, a patent attorney, computer scientist, and longtime software and AI practitioner. In what turned into a wide ranging conversation about artificial intelligence, Plotkin, who is the author of The Genie in the Machine and AI Armor: Securing the Future of Your AI Company with Strategic Intellectual Property, discusses the legal and strategic challenges confronting AI innovation. We discuss why companies should be cautious about treating AI patent counts as evidence of innovation leadership and why the most valuable AI patent portfolios are built around technology that matters to the business for a specific, articulable reason.