The USPTO rescinded its AI-inventorship guidance. What governs AI-assisted inventions now?

On November 28, 2025 the USPTO rescinded its AI-inventorship guidance (89 FR 10043) in its entirety (90 FR 54636). The natural-person requirement it rested on did not go away: under Thaler v. Vidal, an AI system cannot be named as an inventor.

Short answer: The USPTO’s AI-inventorship guidance (89 FR 10043) was rescinded in its entirety on November 28, 2025 (90 FR 54636). Rescinding the guidance did not change the law underneath it. The baseline rule still stands: an inventor named on a US patent must be a natural person, and an AI system cannot be listed as an inventor — the holding of Thaler v. Vidal, 43 F.4th 1207 (Fed. Cir. 2022) (cert. denied April 24, 2023).

What was rescinded, and when

The USPTO’s guidance on inventorship for AI-assisted inventions, published at 89 FR 10043, was withdrawn in full by 90 FR 54636, effective November 28, 2025. There is no successor guidance document that replaced it.

Two consequences follow, and it helps to keep them separate:

The agency’s examination guidance is gone. The document that told examiners and applicants how the Office would approach AI-assisted inventorship no longer applies.
The governing law is not gone. With the guidance withdrawn, AI-assisted inventions are governed by the Patent Act and controlling case law — not by an agency guidance memo.

What governs now: a human inventor

The question the guidance had layered on top of — can an AI be named as an inventor? — was already answered by the Federal Circuit, and that answer is untouched by the rescission.

In Thaler v. Vidal, 43 F.4th 1207 (Fed. Cir. 2022) (cert. denied April 24, 2023), the court held that an inventor must be a natural person and that an AI system cannot be named as an inventor on a US patent application. That holding does not depend on the rescinded guidance and remains the controlling rule.

So for anyone using AI in the invention process, the durable, verifiable rule is simple: name the human being(s) who invented; do not name the AI. Using an AI tool during conception or drafting does not let you list the tool as an inventor.

What this page does not decide

The rescission removed the Office’s guidance on how it evaluates AI-assisted inventions — including how much human contribution is needed and how it is assessed. Those questions now rest on statute and case law rather than on a guidance document, and this page does not attempt to resolve them.

If your practical question is instead “I use AI to draft — what are my duties before the USPTO?”, that is a different (and still-in-force) rule set. See using AI in practice before the USPTO.