AI is eating your IP

SummaryIn this conversation, Tim and Chris examine how artificial intelligence is reshaping the landscape of intellectual property, particularly in patent law and trade secret strategy. They explore the concept of FOSITA (person of ordinary skill in the art) and how AI’s growing capabilities challenge traditional notions of inventorship, obviousness, and enablement. As AI increasingly assists or even drives innovation, they highlight the critical importance of clearly documenting the human role in the inventive process to safeguard patent validity. The discussion also addresses the rising risk of trade secrets becoming readily ascertainable in an AI-driven world, emphasizing the need for a more integrated, system-level approach to defining and protecting proprietary knowledge.Takeaways:AI is making it harder to define who the true inventor is.Including a human name on a patent may not be enough to ensure validity.The standard for what’s “obvious” in patent law is rising due to AI tools.Documenting the human contribution is critical for defensible patents.AI may make trade secrets easier to reverse-engineer or infer.Discrete trade secrets are more vulnerable—system-level knowledge is harder to replicate.Companies need to rethink how they structure and protect IP in an AI-driven world.Both patents and trade secrets are under pressure from rapid AI advances.