When the USPTO released its updated inventorship guidance for AI-assisted inventions on November 28, 2025, it didn’t redefine the law so much as restate a basic rule: inventorship is, and remains, about human conception. Only natural persons can conceive an invention, and only natural persons can be named as inventors.
What the guidance does highlight—implicitly but unmistakably—is a real and increasingly common concern: as AI systems play a larger role in drafting, they may generate technical content that goes beyond what the human inventor actually conceived. When that happens, the resulting application may contain subject matter for which no human inventor exists. And if no human can credibly claim conception of that material, then it cannot properly be claimed.
That is the central inventorship risk for organizations using AI in the patent drafting process.
Historically, patent professionals have expanded on an inventor’s disclosure in ways that are descriptive, not inventive. Elaborating on embodiments, drafting alternatives, providing examples supported by the disclosure—these activities help articulate an invention but do not change its boundaries. They also do not make the drafter an inventor.
AI tools, however, vary dramatically. Some systems can and do introduce elements, capabilities, configurations, or problem–solution pairings that were not part of the inventor’s original conception. If those AI-generated additions find their way into the claims—or if they meaningfully influence the structure of the claim set—they raise two immediate concerns:
This is the scenario the USPTO is implicitly guarding against. The concern is not AI assistance—which is perfectly permissible—but AI expansion beyond what the inventor actually conceived.
Different AI drafting tools take different approaches to this challenge. One approach—used by Paximal—is to intentionally tether the drafting process to the information provided by the user, whether through an invention disclosure form, technical documentation, interviews, or other materials.
The system is designed to work within that disclosed universe. It may articulate the invention at multiple levels of abstraction, draft examples or alternatives consistent with the disclosed framework, and fill in descriptive “white space” much like a patent professional would. But its drafting operations are not intended to introduce new inventive concepts that were not already reasonably supported by the inventor’s description.
In this model, the goal is not to “create” invention but to express it—preserving the link between the inventor’s conception and the content of the patent application. Attorney or practitioner oversight remains an essential step, but the drafting process itself is structured to minimize the risk that the system will drift beyond the permitted scope.
The USPTO’s updated guidance does not discourage AI in patent drafting—it simply clarifies the boundary between permissible assistance and the point where inventorship concerns arise. As long as AI tools remain anchored to the inventor’s disclosure and practitioners verify that the claims track human conception, AI can be integrated into patent practice without undermining inventorship principles.
