CLE Panel Discussion – AI Authorship and Inventorship
Date: May 12, 2026
Location: Elm City Club
Time: 6pm-9pm
Registration Links
This panel discussion will focus on the future of AI Authorship and Inventorship of intellectual property in view of the Supreme Court’s recent cert denial in Thaler v. Perlmutter (Case No. 25-449).
The Thaler case stems from an application for federal copyright registration in 2018 for “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” a piece of visual art which listed an AI software as the owner. in 2022, the registration was rejected, the U.S. Copyright Office finding that human ownership is required.
Thaler also filed two patent applications which similarly listed the AI software as the inventor, with no human co-inventor. In 2025, the DC Circuit affirmed the district court’s ruling, unsurprisingly, inventorship required a human. USPTO 2025 guidance provided that only natural persons can be named as inventors – even when AI plays a significant role in the inventive process.
Both the copyright and patent cases were appealed to the Supreme Court, cert was denied in both cases.
The 2025 USPTO guidance with respect to AI inventors notes that the use of AI does not negate that person’s contributions to a patent so long as the natural person contributed significantly to the AI-assisted invention, where a significant contribution can be shown by the way the
natural person constructs a prompt in view of a specific problem to elicit a particular solution from an AI system, but mere reduction to practice of an AI generated invention is not significant.
Critics of the Court’s denial could stifle AI development and implementation, while the USPTO firmly holds that human contribution is the bedrock of authorship and inventorship.