Abstract The US Patent and Trademark Office’s Revised Inventorship Guidance for AI-Assisted Inventions, issued on 28 November 2025 and effective immediately, fully rescinds the February 2024 guidance and replaces it with a streamlined, revised framework that (i) reaffirms that only natural persons can be inventors, (ii) treats AI systems as mere instruments analogous to other inventor support tools such as software and laboratory equipment, (iii) applies the traditional, fact-intensive US ‘conception’ test uniformly to all inventions without any separate or modified rules for AI assistance, (iv) eliminates Pannu-factor analysis when only one natural person is involved, retaining it solely for joint inventorship among multiple humans, (v) extends the same principles to design and plant patents and (vi) imposes strict natural-person commonality requirements for benefit and priority claims, thereby lowering perceived barriers to patenting AI-assisted inventions, signalling a pro-AI innovation policy shift in the US approach to AI regulation.
Aboy et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
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