Insilico Medicine made headlines when its generative AI platform proposed a promising pulmonary fibrosis drug, with the company proudly announcing the molecule had been “discovered by” its AI. But when it came time to file the patent protecting that chemical structure, the paperwork named five humans—including CEO Alex Zhavoronkov—as the inventors. No mention of the algorithm.
The reason is simple: US law only recognizes human inventors. That principle was cemented in 2022 when an appeals court in Washington, DC, rejected a test case from attorney Ryan Abbott, who had tried to name an AI system called DABUS as the inventor of a better food container. The court didn’t wrestle with philosophical questions about machine consciousness or the nature of creativity. It simply noted that statutes describe an inventor as an “individual,” and the plain meaning of that word is a human being.
Sarah Korman, a patent attorney who now serves as chief business officer and legal officer of Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs, says there’s “no doubt” the laws will eventually need to evolve. The US Patent and Trademark Office itself has acknowledged that AI systems can perform acts that would constitute inventorship if done by a human. The real question going forward isn’t whether AI can invent—it’s whether any human contributed enough to legitimately claim the credit.
Abbott worries that excluding AI-generated outputs from patent protection could dampen drug development, the exact opposite of what intellectual-property law is supposed to accomplish. The Constitution grants exclusive rights specifically “to promote the Progress of Science and the Useful Arts.” Under the Biden administration, the patent office issued guidance on when humans could claim co-inventor status on AI-assisted discoveries. After Trump took office, that guidance was reversed—AI is now treated as just a tool, like a calculator, no disclosure required.
For now, companies are keeping humans firmly in the loop and documenting everything. Zhavoronkov points out that human chemists still synthesize the drugs, create variants, and run animal tests. “That’s the person who is going to be named on the patent,” he says. But Abbott poses an uncomfortable hypothetical: “What if I asked Claude to cure cancer, and it did? I think it would be inappropriate to claim that I invented that.” The gap between what AI can do and what the law will recognize is only widening.
