Source: Bloomberg Law

Today's creators increasingly fuse human talent with artificial intelligence, creating outputs where machine contribution can be decisive and raising questions about entitlement to traditional intellectual property protection. Copyright law has historically operated on a sliding scale that rewards deeper human creativity with long-term rights while offering narrower protection for functional or capital-driven works; AI now tests the tether to a human creator as machines begin to outperform humans in scientific and creative tasks. In life sciences, AI drives drug discovery, target identification, molecule design, and clinical optimization, threatening an industry reliant on patent-backed market exclusivity when many patent systems require a human inventor. In software, AI is embedded across the lifecycle — from code generation to testing and monitoring — producing potential gaps in infringement remedies and prompting firms to lean on trade secrets and contractual protections. In marketing, AI-generated content may lack copyright absent substantial human creative input, and prompt similarity can yield near-identical outputs that risk brand dilution.

Patent offices and courts in the US, UK, Europe, China, and Japan have consistently held that AI cannot be named as an inventor, although inventions where a human can be identified as making the inventive contribution remain patentable. A few jurisdictions take different approaches: the UK contains a statutory safety net granting a 50-year copyright by legal fiction to the person who made necessary arrangements for a computer-generated work; Ukraine enacted a standalone 25-year sui generis right for AI output; and Chinese courts in certain cases have recognised copyright where the human user demonstrated sufficient creative control through iterative prompting and selection. These divergences complicate cross-border exploitation and enforcement, so businesses should keep humans visibly and evidentially in the creative and inventive loop, update employment terms, agency agreements, and AI platform licences to address ownership, and consider trade secrets, trademarks, and design rights as complementary protections while policymakers consider reform.