← Back to Who Owns It, and Who Invented It?

Thaler v. Vidal: An Inventor Must Be Human

Federal Circuit, decided 5 August 2022. Read from the opinion; quotations verified against the court's text.

Holding

On August 5, 2022 the Federal Circuit held that the Patent Act's use of the word "individuals" unambiguously means human beings, so an artificial intelligence system cannot be listed as an inventor, and it expressly stated that it was not deciding whether inventions made by human beings with the assistance of AI are eligible for patent protection.

Stephen Thaler tried to name an AI system as the inventor on two patent applications. The Patent Office refused and the Federal Circuit agreed, on the narrowest possible ground: the Patent Act says inventors are "individuals," the ordinary meaning of that word is a human being, and where the text is plain the analysis is over.

What the court did not decide is the part that matters to almost everyone building with AI today. In its own words, it was "not confronted today with the question of whether inventions made by human beings with the assistance of AI are eligible for patent protection." That question remains open.

Why the Reasoning Is Narrow on Purpose

The court did not reach any of the larger questions the case invited. It did not decide whether an AI can conceive of anything, whether AI-generated output is inventive, or what a person must contribute for the resulting invention to be theirs. It resolved a question of statutory text and stopped.

That matters for how the decision should be read. A holding that rests on the plain meaning of one word is a holding with very little reach beyond that word. It settles who may appear on the inventor line. It settles nothing about what happens when a person uses a tool.

What It Means If You Build With AI

The practical consequence is not that AI-assisted work is unpatentable. It is that a human being has to be identifiable as the inventor, which makes the record of who decided what into something worth keeping.

That record is ordinary engineering hygiene rather than legal work: which problem a person framed, which approach they chose and why, what they rejected, what they changed after seeing a model's output. Teams that already write this down for their own reasons are in a better position than teams reconstructing it later from commit messages.

The sentence readers add that the opinion does not support. "AI can't be an inventor" is accurate. "So AI-assisted inventions are in trouble" is the reader's own inference, and this opinion expressly declines to reach it. Anyone citing Thaler for the second proposition is citing it for something it says it is not deciding.

What the Patent Office Has Said Since

Thaler left the human-plus-AI question open as a matter of court law, and it is still open there. The Patent Office has since answered the operational half, and it did so by refusing to build a special rule.

On November 26, 2025 the USPTO issued revised inventorship guidance for AI-assisted inventions, "rescinding its February 2024 guidance on this topic in its entirety." The replacement is short in substance: "No new, separate or modified standard is created for or applies to AI-assisted inventions." Ordinary conception applies, claim by claim, and "AI systems, including generative AI and other computational models, are tools used by human inventors."

This is agency guidance, not a court holding, and the difference has teeth. It tells you how examiners will approach the question. It does not tell you how a court would, and it does not settle inventorship for any particular invention. Which humans conceived the claimed subject matter is still decided on facts.

What This Case Is Not

  • It is not a holding that inventions made with AI assistance cannot be patented. The opinion says the opposite about its own scope.
  • It does not decide whether any particular person's contribution makes them an inventor. That is a legal determination a patent attorney makes on the facts and the claims, and it is one where being wrong voids the patent.
  • It does not bless or condemn any documentation practice. No opinion holds that a given record-keeping habit satisfies the law.

Read alongside Fortress Iron v. Digger Specialties, which shows what happens when the humans who should have been named were not.

Educational, not legal advice. Consult a qualified patent attorney about inventorship on your own applications.

Sources