Posts in Artificial Intelligence

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.

Although I am not an attorney, I have been deeply enmeshed in the patent process as an inventor for three decades. And I have grown an appreciation for your profession that is perhaps deeper than most folks’. The majority of my work over the past 30 years has been in AI and machine learning. And I want to share some thoughts with you today about how all of this intersects and how you, everyone in this room, are really the last line of defense that humanity has in maintaining what it means to be human. 

As artificial intelligence adoption accelerates across both commercial and government sectors, traditional contracting frameworks are being stretched beyond their limits. That tension was the focus of a panel at IPWatchdog Live 2026 today, featuring Judge Ryan T. Holte of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims; Stephanie Curcio, co-founder and CEO of NLPatent; and TJ Whittle, Legal Counsel at Anduril Industries.

As discussed in my prior article, the growing adoption and sophistication of assistive AI tools for patent prosecution are paving the way for material business and career impacts, such as decreased prosecution revenue and reduced staffing over the long term. Despite these potential risks, practitioners and enterprises may experience widely differing outcomes due to their client mix, expertise, and capacity to navigate shifting winds to advantage.

Yesterday, U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, and Peter Welch (D-VT) sent a letter addressed to Liang Rubo, CEO of Chinese technology company ByteDance, urging the immediate shutdown of ByteDance’s video generation platform Seedance 2.0. Calling ByteDance’s recent pledges to respect copyright “a delay tactic,” the Senators join a growing chorus of copyright advocates raising alarms about rampant infringement being committed by users of Seedance and other generative artificial intelligence (AI) platforms.

Just over a month ago, the Human Artistry Campaign launched “Stealing Isn’t Innovation”—a graphic advertising campaign backed by over 1,000 artists, performers, authors, organizations and other creators. The Copyright Alliance joined dozens of groups and organizations supporting this powerful moment of creative community unity and strength. The campaign’s high-level three-word-message was simple and obvious, and difficult to contest. On a policy level, the campaign was widely, and correctly, understood as a clear statement supporting the core principle that training AI models on copyrighted works should be licensed by willing buyers and sellers.  “Big AI” published its response to this campaign in late February, speaking through two tech-aligned proxies—the Foundation for American Innovation (FAI) and Public Knowledge (PK). For a number of reasons, it’s deeply unpersuasive. 

From a trickle just a few years ago, AI use in the patent profession has become a rushing torrent. AI tools, features, and applications are now an integral and sometimes invisible part of patent practice. From invention harvesting and prior art searching to drafting, filing, opinion work, litigation, and licensing, the savvy patent practitioner almost certainly has AI embedded somewhere in their workflow.

Welcome back to Cool AI Patents of the Month, where we spotlight inventive developments at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and intellectual property. In this installment, we take a look at two standout innovations—one that could transform how we watch sports, and another that may reshape how our vehicles understand the road ahead. Both illustrate how quickly AI is integrating itself into our daily lives.

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order list including the denial of a petition for writ of certiorari filed by Dr. Stephen Thaler that challenged federal agency and court rulings preventing copyright registration for an image generated entirely by artificial intelligence (AI). In following the U.S. Solicitor General’s call to deny cert to Thaler’s appeal, the Supreme Court declined invitations from both sides of the AI authorship debate to clarify the copyrightability of works that are substantially AI-generated.