AI-designed drugs can't name AI as inventor under US law
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- Insilico Medicine claimed in a press release that its generative AI platform "discovered" a promising drug for pulmonary fibrosis, but the patent names five humans including CEO Alex Zhavoronkov as inventors — with no mention of AI.
- A 2022 DC appeals court ruled AI cannot be named as a patent inventor after Ryan Abbott's pro bono DABUS test case argued an AI-designed food container should list the AI as inventor; the court said statutes define "individual" as a human being.
- The US Patent and Trademark Office reversed course after Trump took office, now calling AI "merely a tool, like a calculator" and scrapping Biden-era guidance on when humans qualify as co-inventors of AI discoveries.
- Patent attorney Sarah Korman, chief business officer of Alphabet spinout Isomorphic Labs, told MIT Technology Review's EmTech that "there needs to be a human inventor or there's no invention and no patent" — but added laws will need to evolve.
- Abbott warns AI-generated drugs could face patent invalidation challenges for listing the wrong inventors, and that excluding AI outputs from IP protection could "put a damper on future drug development" by undermining the incentive structure in the Constitution's IP clause.
- The US Copyright Office is separately refusing to grant copyrights to AI-generated images and text, drawing objections from the Motion Picture Association of America whose members rely on those tools.
- Zhavoronkov argues humans remain essential at Insilico because chemists synthesize drugs, create variants, test on animals, and "someone will still push the button and give the budget" — though Abbott counters that mere button-pushing shouldn't count as inventorship.
Why it matters: AI-discovered drugs from companies like Insilico cannot list their AI systems as inventors under current US law, so legal credit — and patent protection — flows to whichever human "pushed the button." If a future court decides that button-pushing is not real inventorship, AI-generated drugs risk being unpatentable entirely, chilling the exact innovation pipeline that Article I's IP clause exists to encourage and putting billions of dollars in AI-discovered therapeutics in legal limbo.
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