Patent Practice
Patent-office guidance and global inventorship rules for AI-assisted patent practice.
Patent practice now presents two related AI questions across the major patent systems. One is operational: how lawyers, agents, and applicants may use AI in patent-office filings, prosecution, oppositions, and related proceedings. The other is doctrinal: whether an AI system can be named as an inventor in the first place.
Those questions are moving in a broadly consistent direction. Most patent offices and reviewing courts are applying existing duties of accuracy, certification, confidentiality, supervision, and procedural compliance rather than creating sweeping AI-specific disclosure mandates, while major jurisdictions continue to require a human inventor even when AI materially assisted the inventive process.
Why this is separate
This tab stays separate from Litigation Practice because patent-office practice and patent inventorship raise a different mix of questions from court filing rules. It now covers U.S. office practice plus selected global patent-office and appellate developments on AI inventorship, while still keeping the strongest weight on primary sources.
U.S. office practice table
| Authority | Source | AI practice point |
|---|---|---|
| USPTO | Guidance on Use of Artificial Intelligence-Based Tools in Practice Before the USPTO, 89 Fed. Reg. 25609 | Existing duties of candor, signature certification, confidentiality, supervision, and export-control awareness apply to AI-assisted patent and trademark practice. |
| USPTO Director; PTAB; TTAB; OGC | Director Vidal memorandum on AI-related party and practitioner misconduct | AI-assisted submissions must be reviewed and verified by a person; available sanctions include striking papers, limiting submissions, terminating proceedings, OED discipline, and possible false-statement exposure. |
| PTAB | USPTO Federal Register guidance applied to PTAB practice | AI-assisted IPR, PGR, derivation, claim-construction, prior-art, expert, and legal-analysis work should be treated as high-verification material under existing PTAB candor and sanctions rules. |
| TTAB | USPTO Federal Register guidance applied to TTAB practice | AI-assisted drafting must still be verified, and AI-generated specimens or marketplace evidence that does not show actual use creates special misstatement and evidentiary risk. |
Global Patent Offices
This section is an unauthoritative working summary for issue-spotting and internal tracking. Entries marked Medium or Needs primary source should be verified against primary office, court, or appellate materials before external or legal-signoff use.
Confirmed by court/appellate ruling
| Jurisdiction | AI can be named inventor? | Authority | Confidence | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Japan | No | Tokyo District Court (2024); Intellectual Property High Court (Jan. 30, 2025); Supreme Court final appeal dismissed (Mar. 2026) | High | Japanese courts held that, under the current Patent Act, an inventor must be a natural person. The Supreme Court dismissal left the lower-court rulings in place and made the result final. |
| United States | No | Thaler v. Vidal, 43 F.4th 1207 (Fed. Cir. 2022), cert. denied | High | The Federal Circuit held that “individual” in the Patent Act means a natural person, so an AI system cannot be named as inventor. |
| United Kingdom | No | Thaler v Comptroller-General of Patents [2023] UKSC 49 | High | The UK Supreme Court held that only a natural person may be an inventor, and ownership of an AI system does not itself create entitlement to patent rights. |
| European Patent Office | No | EPO Board of Appeal J 8/20 and J 9/20 (2021) | High | The EPO held that the inventor designation must identify a person with legal capacity, which an AI system cannot satisfy. |
| Germany | No, but AI assistance may be described | Federal Court of Justice (BGH), X ZB 5/22 (June 11, 2024) | High | Only a human can be named inventor. German practice allows the application to indicate that AI assisted the inventive process. |
| Australia | No | Commissioner of Patents v Thaler [2022] FCAFC 62 | High | Although a lower court briefly accepted AI inventorship, the Full Federal Court unanimously reversed and held that inventors must be natural persons. |
Patent-office level only
| Jurisdiction | AI can be named inventor? | Authority | Confidence | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New Zealand | No | Stephen L. Thaler [2022] NZIPOPAT 2 (IPONZ hearings decision, published on NZLII) | High | IPONZ rejected DABUS inventorship at the patent-office level, treating the Patents Act as requiring a human inventor. IPONZ confirms that its hearing decisions are published through NZLII. |
| South Korea | No | KIPO official press release on DABUS rejection | High | KIPO stated that AI cannot be a legal inventor under the Korean Patent Act and described its dismissal of the DABUS-based filing on the office’s own domain. |
| Israel | No | Commissioner of Patents decision (Mar. 15, 2023), Apps. 268604 and 268605; ILPO portal lookup path also available | Medium-High | The Commissioner held that the inventor under Israeli patent law must be a human being and that machine ownership or accession does not create a valid chain of title for a patent application. |
| Taiwan | No | MOEA Petitions Committee decision on the TIPO domain, covering the TIPO refusal history | High | TIPO refused the DABUS applications at the office level, and the official TIPO-hosted appeal materials reflect a human-inventor requirement under Taiwan’s Patent Act. |
| India | No | IP India Public Search file-wrapper retrieval path for Application 202017019068; see also WIPO Patentscope record | Medium-High | The Indian Patent Office refusal order is retrievable through the e-Register for Application 202017019068. The bottom line is strong, but the office does not expose a stable direct deep link to the order itself. |
Outlier / limited precedential value
| Jurisdiction | AI can be named inventor? | Authority | Confidence | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| South Africa | Yes (patent granted) | South African Patent No. 2021/03242 | High on grant, low on precedential weight | South Africa granted a patent listing DABUS as inventor. However, this result should be treated cautiously because South Africa does not generally conduct substantive examination before grant, so the grant does not carry the same doctrinal weight as a court ruling or examined-office decision in the United States, United Kingdom, EPO, Japan, or Germany. |
Source note: This section is intentionally secondary and unauthoritative. Clearon uses it for issue-spotting and jurisdiction tracking, not as a substitute for primary patent-office, court, or appellate materials.
Practice notes
- Do not treat patent-office AI guidance as if it were a court standing order or a universal cross-jurisdiction rule.
- Do not assume AI use must be disclosed in every patent-office or patent-tribunal matter; the better baseline is verification, confidentiality review, and compliance with forum-specific rules.
- Verify every AI-assisted factual statement, legal argument, citation, prior-art summary, inventorship characterization, claim-construction point, and prosecution-related assertion.
- Review tool terms before entering confidential client information, invention disclosures, unpublished patent material, prosecution strategy, business proprietary information, export-controlled information, or sealed/protected matter.
- On inventorship issues, distinguish between human-assisted invention, AI-assisted invention, and AI-only inventorship claims; those categories do not receive the same treatment across current sources.
Source note: Clearon gives preference to primary patent-office, court, appellate, tribunal, and agency sources from the relevant jurisdiction. Secondary trackers are used as leads, not as final authority.