Societal Impact and Risk AI is reshaping how we live, work, invent, and create. It holds promise for tackling difficult problems (e.g., early disease detection, more efficient chip design) but also poses risks, including threats to safety, rights, and trust if AI is deployed irresponsibly. The USPTO wants to ensure that AI’s benefits are realized while mitigating risks like bad actors locking up innovation or undermining public trust.
USPTO’s Role As “America’s Innovation Agency,” the USPTO operates at the intersection of law, policy, and technology. It grants patents, registers trademarks, and advises on intellectual property (IP). AI innovation is booming: AI-related patent applications more than doubled since 2002 and have risen 33% since 2018. Yet rapid progress in areas like generative AI raises new questions around IP law, patentability, inventorship, and more. At the same time, the USPTO itself can harness AI to improve how it handles over a million patent and trademark applications a year and how it makes its massive patent data available to researchers and innovators.
Vision
“Unleashing America’s potential through the adoption of AI to drive and scale U.S. innovation, inclusive capitalism, and global competitiveness.”
Mission
To achieve this mission, the USPTO lays out five AI Focus Areas:
Patents
Examine how AI shapes criteria like subject matter eligibility, obviousness, written description, and inventorship.
Adapt patent policies in response to AI’s evolving role in the inventive process.
Trademarks
Study how AI can help protect brand owners (e.g., anti-counterfeiting) but also how AI-generated content challenges traditional trademark law.
Copyright
Monitor and advise on litigation over AI-generated outputs and data ingestion.
Coordinate with the U.S. Copyright Office and Congress on potential legislation.
Other IP Protections
Examine AI’s interplay with trade secrets, licensing practices, and potential misappropriation concerns.
Conduct economic and legal research on how IP policy drives (or impedes) AI innovation and commercialization. Publish and maintain datasets (e.g., the AI Patent Dataset) to empower external researchers.
Work with courts, Congress, and other agencies (e.g., DOJ, FTC) to ensure robust, enforceable IP rights and fair marketplace competition. Collaborate internationally on AI and IP standards, infringement enforcement, and best practices.
Ensure computing power (e.g., cloud resources, sandbox testbeds) can handle large-scale data processing for AI training and operations. Maintain high-quality, up-to-date datasets and a “best-in-class” Open Data program so that external innovators can benefit from USPTO data.
Evaluate AI tools that directly improve the agency’s patent/trademark examination, search, and user support (e.g., prior-art search, chat assistants). Deploy AI carefully, applying agile development, crowdsourcing, and user feedback to ensure solutions are reliable and beneficial.
Human-First Approach: Combine AI’s strengths with the USPTO’s expert workforce, while providing clarity on AI limitations. Integrate AI into examiner workflows, legal processes, and other business areas, seeking continuous improvements via user feedback loops.
Legal Practice: Study how AI changes IP legal services, ensuring practitioners use AI ethically.
IP Awareness: Promote “responsible AI” best practices (e.g., legal data sourcing, content attribution, licensing compliance).
Patent Examination: Equip examiners to evaluate increasingly complex AI-related applications, from basic to cutting-edge AI inventions.
Trademark Examination: Train attorneys on AI’s growing role in brand management, counterfeit detection, and NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) issues.
Recruiting: Attract new examiners with AI skills to keep pace with booming AI patent filings.
IT Staff: Provide specialized training in AI product development and responsible deployment.
Legal and Adjudicative Professionals: Offer deeper AI knowledge for judges and legal staff grappling with AI-intensive disputes.
Enterprise Resources: Launch an agency-wide AI resource portal with curated training. Continue with large-scale lecture series featuring top AI experts.
Strategic Feedback: Use listening sessions and roundtables to capture real-world insights from academia, industry, small businesses, inventors, and IP practitioners.
Academic Collaboration: Work with universities, research institutes, and technology transfer offices to ensure AI breakthroughs transition quickly from lab to market.
Commerce Department: Coordinate with sister bureaus (like NIST) on AI standards and risk management.
Other Federal Agencies: Continue relationships with DOJ, FTC, FDA, NSF, and the U.S. Copyright Office, among others, to ensure alignment on competition, legislation, and innovation initiatives.
International IP Offices: Discuss common AI-related IP challenges (e.g., patents on generative AI inventions) and share best practices.
Global Organizations: Collaborate via WIPO, G7, and other international forums to harmonize AI standards, rules, and enforcement on a global scale.