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The 2024 AI Inventorship Guidance Is Rescinded

USPTO, 90 FR 54636, published 28 November 2025. Agency guidance, not a court decision. Read from the primary document; quotations verified against its own text.

Read this with Thaler v. Vidal. Thaler settles who may be named: a natural person. This guidance is how the Office now decides which humans conceived what. Read alone, Thaler reads as though the human-plus-AI question is wholly unanswered, which is no longer true of examination practice.
What it says

On November 28, 2025 the USPTO rescinded its February 2024 Inventorship Guidance for AI-Assisted Inventions and replaced it, withdrawing the approach that applied the Pannu joint-inventorship factors to AI-assisted inventions and confirming that those factors apply only when deciding whether multiple natural persons are joint inventors, so that a single person inventing with AI assistance is judged by conception alone.

Anyone working from a 2024 summary of USPTO practice on AI-assisted inventions is working from a rescinded document. In its own words, "The USPTO hereby rescinds the previously published Inventorship Guidance for AI-Assisted Inventions."

The change that matters is what happened to the Pannu factors. The 2024 approach applied that joint-inventorship test to AI-assisted inventions. The revised guidance withdraws it: "The Pannu factors only apply when determining whether multiple natural persons qualify as joint inventors," and Pannu "is inapplicable when only one natural person is involved in developing an invention with AI assistance."

An AI system is not a joint inventor, because it is not a natural person. So where one human invented with AI help there is no joint-inventorship question at all, only the ordinary question of conception, which the guidance calls "the touchstone of inventorship."

What This Does Not Decide

Inventorship is adjacent to patentability and is not the same thing. Nothing here says whether anything is patentable, novel or non-obvious. It says how the Office decides who conceived a claimed invention.
  • It does not say whether a particular person is an inventor of a particular claim.
  • It is agency guidance. It binds examiners, not courts.
  • It does not disturb Thaler, which remains the authority on who may be named.

Educational, not legal advice. This page reports what an authority says. Applying it to a matter is work for a registered practitioner with the file in front of them.

Sources

  • USPTO, Revised Inventorship Guidance for AI-Assisted Inventions, 90 FR 54636 (Nov. 28, 2025)
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