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January 30, 2025 | Tom Ballard

What impact will AI have on patent disclosures?

Two faculty members and a former Patent Examiner tackle the topic in a paper published in Nature Biotechnology.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is impacting all sectors of society, so one might legitimately ask this question: “How Will AI Affect Patent Disclosures?”

In a paper published in Nature Biotechnology, three Stanford University-affiliated co-authors tackle an issue of growing importance at the intersection of law and technology: How the use of AI to codify and communicate knowledge may influence the usefulness of the technical literature for subsequent researchers and innovators. In particular, they studied how the growing use of AI in the patent-drafting process is exacerbating existing challenges around patent law’s disclosure requirement.

Patent law requires that inventors not only describe their inventions but do so with enough clarity that someone skilled in the relevant field can replicate the work. This disclosure requirement helps disseminate knowledge about new inventions and is an important part of what society gets in return for granting inventors exclusive rights to their inventions. Disclosure also ensures that a patent’s scope is limited to what the inventor contributed, according to the authors of “How Will AI Affect Patent Disclosures?” However, enforcing the disclosure standards has historically been inconsistent, they write. Patent examiners, working under tight time constraints and with sometimes limited training, often prioritize evaluating novelty and obviousness over assessing disclosure quality.

“AI will amplify errors in both improperly granting poorly disclosed patents and improperly denying patents on the basis of earlier AI-generated references that do not actually disclose those inventions,” write co-authors , including Stanford Law School Professor Lisa Larrimore Ouellette; Victoria Fang, a former United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Patent Examiner who collaborated on the study while a student at Stanford Law; and Nicholas T. Ouellette, a Stanford Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

They propose several strategies to improve disclosure quality and mitigate the risks of AI-generated patents, including:

  1. Requiring inventors to implement at least some version of their invention before filing a patent or to meet stricter disclosure requirements for unproven technologies;
  2. Providing patent examiners with better training and resources to evaluate disclosures effectively;
  3. Bringing in external experts to review disclosures and enhance the rigor of patent examinations, particularly for cutting-edge or highly technical inventions;
  4. Using AI itself to improve patent examination by identifying potentially problematic disclosures for closer scrutiny; and
  5. Extending the window for challenging a patent’s disclosure beyond the current nine-month limit to provide a safety net for addressing issues missed during the initial examination.

The report comes on the heels of the USPTO announcing a new Artificial Intelligence Strategy to guide the agency’s efforts toward fulfilling the potential of AI within USPTO operations and across the intellectual property (IP) ecosystem.



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