Source: Greenberg Traurig Law Blog

Greenberg Traurig Law Blog examines the evolving and expanding role of artificial intelligence in U.S. patent litigation as 2026 unfolds. The patent outlook has become increasingly promising due to recent procedural changes at the USPTO under new leadership, which has begun to overturn previous decisions holding AI-assisted improvements to be ineligible. However, this shift has also led to an influx of disputes regarding Section 101 eligibility and the specific extent of human contribution required for valid inventorship. Litigators are adapting their deposition strategies to probe deeper into whether an invention was truly conceived by a human or merely "spit out" by a model like ChatGPT.

Beyond inventorship, AI is reshaping the mechanics of litigation itself, with the emergence of AI-to-AI negotiations in patent prosecution and the use of agentic AI for complex workflow validation. Courts are now dealing with cases where the fallibility of AI—such as hallucinations in prior art searches—is becoming a central issue. As firms move beyond episodic experimentation toward embedding AI into their core operating models, the legal industry is entering a "Year of Evaluation" where the focus is on the actual utility and measurable impact of AI tools in high-stakes intellectual property disputes.