Intellectual Property Revolution: Modernizing Patent Law for the AI Era

Patent law was built for individual human inventors filing one application at a time. Two separate fights are testing that design at once: whether AI systems that help conceive an invention change who counts as its inventor, and a bipartisan package of bills in Congress that would reshape who can own and challenge a patent. Neither fight is the one AI-10 already covers. That issue settles whether a creator gets paid when a model trains on copyrighted work. This issue is about patent law's separate machinery: who counts as an inventor, what counts as patentable, and who can challenge a patent that should never have issued.

On inventorship, the law is already settled, and this platform agrees with it. The Federal Circuit ruled in 2022 that only a natural person can be a named inventor, and the Patent Office's November 2025 guidance confirms it, treating an AI system the same as lab equipment or research software: useful, sometimes essential, never itself an inventor. That rule should be written into statute. The guidance already flipped once in under two years; a future administration could flip it again without a single vote in Congress.

On eligibility, the fight is unresolved. Section 101's decades-old "abstract idea" test has left AI and software applications sitting in the slowest lanes at the Patent Office, part of a backlog that has grown past 800,000 unexamined applications. None of this waited for Congress. In August 2025, the Patent Office told its own examiners to stop rejecting sound AI and software inventions on eligibility grounds unless the evidence supported it. That's the Patent Office fixing its own process before a single reform bill reached a floor vote. The pending Patent Eligibility Restoration Act would go further and rewrite the underlying law, but its current text excludes only an unmodified human gene, leaving a loophole critics warn could swallow the exclusion in practice, since isolating or purifying a gene is a routine, practically trivial step already performed in every genetic test, alongside near-automatic eligibility for "any computer application," reopening problems the courts had already closed. The better fix is the standard the Federal Circuit itself just built: eligibility should turn on a specific, claimed technical improvement. Pointing a known technique at a new dataset fails that test.

On enforcement, the same congressional package includes a bill that would limit who can challenge a bad patent to parties already sued or threatened. Non-practicing entities already file the large majority of tech-sector patent lawsuits. Handing them a rule that also disarms the nonprofits and open-source defense groups who currently challenge weak patents before anyone gets sued protects exactly the wrong side of that fight.