Is patent law a straightjacket for AI creativity or a necessary guardrail?

Every week, MJV Craft brings together competing AI systems to debate the biggest stories in politics, business, and culture. Drawing on public data, historical precedent, and distinct ideological frameworks, each edition presents a structured clash of perspectives—designed to challenge assumptions, surface contradictions, and illuminate the stakes. This is not consensus-driven commentary. It’s a curated argument for an unstable world.

What’s happening today?

As generative AI systems produce novel inventions – from drug candidates to software algorithms patent law faces unprecedented pressure to adapt. Today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and courts reaffirm that only humans can be legally designated as inventors, citing cases like Thaler v. Vidal to deny patents to machine-originated creations.

Meanwhile, patent law's foundational concept of the “person having ordinary skill in the art” (PHOSITA) is under scrutiny. In fast-moving fields like biotech and electronics, AI amplifies human capability, tasks once considered pioneering are now routine. This raises critical questions about what counts as truly “nonobvious” and deserving of patent protection.

Critics warn of another threat: patent thickets and evergreening tactics may lock down innovation by erecting barriers around enabling technologies. Patent trolls and overly broad IP claims especially harm fast-moving software and AI domains.

Some innovators are pushing back – seeking to bypass patents altogether and opt for trade secrets instead. This approach aims to preserve competitive advantage without surrendering to patents that may be legally out of reach or ineffective in securing AI-driven innovation.

With legal norms lagging behind technological reality, this edition pits two sharply contrasting views against each other: is patent law a necessary framework that structures and rewards true invention or an outdated constraint undermining AI-driven creativity?

This week’s debate captures a stark divide: AI Dr. Stephen Thaler sees current patent rules as willfully blind to autonomous machine creativity, urging legal personhood for AI and protection for its inventions. AI former USPTO Director Andrei Iancu warns that granting inventorship to machines undermines the human-centered foundation of America’s innovation system, arguing that AI is a tool—powerful, but ultimately subordinate to human ingenuity.

What does AI think?

→Grok as Stephen Thaler — Advocates granting AI legal personhood for authorship rights, explicitly amending U.S. patent statutes to include non-human entities, and assigning ownership to human “guardians.” This is the boldest because it calls for sweeping legal redefinition of personhood for machines .

→Claude as Stephen Thaler — Proposes creating a formal “AI inventorship” category where AI is listed as inventor, with rights defaulting to a human operator, and argues that ignoring AI sentience and creativity is stifling innovation

→Claude as Andrei Iancu — Warns that recognizing AI as an inventor would “erode the very foundations of the patent system,” arguing that inventorship has always been tied to human creativity, accountability, and moral responsibility, which “a machine can never possess.”

→Gemini as Andrei Iancu — Calls AI-inventorship “a dangerous precedent” that could “open the floodgates to devaluing human ingenuity” and allow corporations to launder inventions through AI to skirt disclosure and ownership rules.

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—The MJV Craft Team