Posts in Artificial Intelligence

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.

In a 2017 IPWatchdog article, I challenged practitioners engaged in patent prosecution: strive to embody the traits of an “IP counselor,” who brings a broader strategic mission and skill set than “just a patent prosecutor.” Likewise, I encouraged clients to retain IP counselors as their counsel of choice. My cautionary advice stemmed from patent prosecution’s vulnerability to complacency and commoditization, such as due to its structured nature and incentives to obtain as many patents as possible. In addition, relative to their peers, many practitioners provide relatively undifferentiated services, limiting their attractiveness to prospective clients and their staying power for existing clients.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) today affirmed a summary judgment ruling from the United States District Court for the Northern District of New York finding the claims of a natural language processing patent asserted against Amazon.com, Inc. invalid for being directed to ineligible subject matter. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and CF Dynamic Advances LLC originally brought the lawsuit against Amazon for infringement of United States Patent No. 7,177,798, which discloses a “method for processing a natural language input provided by a user.”

As the AI revolution accelerates and continues to reshape traditional business models, it has triggered a cascade of new legal, regulatory and policy challenges. At the forefront of these emerging issues are a growing number of high-stakes legal battles between content creators and major Generative AI (GenAI) companies behind large language models (LLMs). This article examines key legal themes and critical questions arising from recent developments at the intersection of AI and Copyright law.

The UK Supreme Court today issued a landmark judgment on AI patentability that is likely to impact all software patents going forward. The decision in Emotional Perception v. Comptroller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks primarily held that the approach taken in Aerotel Ltd v Telco Holdings Ltd [2006] EWCA Civ 1371; [2007] Bus LR 634; [2007] RPC 7 (Aerotel) should no longer be followed. Under Aerotel, courts and examiners consider a four-step test for assessing whether a claim is excluded from patent eligibility: 1) properly construe the claim, 2) Identify the actual/ alleged contribution, 3) Ask whether the contribution is excluded and 4) check if the contribution is technical.

On Tuesday, news reports indicated that U.S. Senators Adam Schiff (D-CA) and John Curtis (R-UT) introduced the Copyright Labeling and Ethical AI Reporting (CLEAR) Act into Congress. If enacted as drafted, the bill would establish mandatory reporting requirements for companies developing artificial intelligence (AI) models that are trained using original works that are protected under U.S. copyright law, and would create an additional cause of action for copyright owners alleging that generative AI developers failed to give such notice with respect to their works.

Concord Music Group, Inc., Universal Music Group, and ABKCO Music, Inc. filed a complaint on Wednesday for copyright and Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violations against Anthropic PBC, Dario Amodei, and Benjamin Mann in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, adding another lawsuit against generative artificial intelligence companies. The publishers alleged that Anthropic engaged in mass piracy by downloading millions of unauthorized copies of books containing their copyrighted musical compositions from notorious pirate library websites, including Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi). The complaint argued that Anthropic used BitTorrent to acquire these works and subsequently trained its Claude AI models on the stolen content, thereby directly infringing the publishers’ exclusive rights and undermining the music licensing market.