May 20, 2026, 13:22 GMT | Insight
AI will force patent holders and offices to reassess core principles, including inventorship and examiner capacity, Ruud Peters warns. Faster, cheaper and more complex AI-assisted inventions will increase filings and test whether the current system can still create business value at scale, said the former Philips executive vice president.
Artificial intelligence will force patent holders to reassess core concepts, including inventorship, obviousness and the role of patent offices, according to Ruud Peters, former chief intellectual property officer and executive vice president at Philips.
The technology will also accelerate inventive activity, increase filing volumes and make inventions more complex, Peters said at an IP event on Tuesday.
“AI enables making more inventions faster and cheaper, so there have been increased filings, and that, of course, puts pressure on the patent system,” said Peters, co-director of the Center for Intellectual Property. “That's a strategic question that we need to address.”
The challenge is not limited to filing volumes. Peters said AI will affect the whole invention chain, from inventors and patent attorneys to drafting, prosecution, opposition work and patent offices such as the European Patent Office.
AI will also make inventions more complex by enabling combinations of technologies from different fields, he said. That creates problems for examiners who may be experts in one technical area, but not in the cross-disciplinary combinations generated by AI-assisted invention.
“AI forces us to revisit the fundamentals of the patent system,” Peters said.
Current patent laws still require a human inventor, but that assumption may become harder to sustain if AI contributes more substantially to inventive output.
“If everybody is an augmented AI-augmented inventor, what is an obvious person skilled in the art?” he said.
AI is the latest example of a changing business environment to which IP strategy must respond. He said he had argued since 2008 that “environments keep changing, and IP strategy has to change with it,” but warned that AI raises a more fundamental problem.
Earlier changes had been absorbed by the patent system without altering its purpose, Peters said, but AI is different.
“It not only affects businesses and IP, but it also impacts the patent system in itself," he said.
AI investments by
Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, and
Amazon have commitments through 2026 totaling around $600 billion. Those investments mean AI capabilities will improve significantly, he said, accelerating inventive activity and patent filings.
Peters said the issue should not be left until a crisis emerges, arguing that the patent community still has time to consider whether alternatives or additions to the current system are needed.
The constant in changing environments, he said, is not any particular portfolio or process, but that “IP must have value” and “must create business value.” AI, he said, will test whether the current patent system can still do that “at the speed and scale” now emerging.
*”Global IP Impact Summit,” organized by LexisNexis, May 20-21, Wiesbaden, Germany. MLex is owned by LexisNexis.
Please email editors@mlex.com to contact the editorial staff regarding this story, or to submit the names of lawyers and advisers.
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