Title
Inventorship and IP after Knowledge-Creating AI
Abstract
Can AI be an inventor? Recent judicial rulings rejecting artificial intelligence as an inventor, exemplified by the Swiss Federal Administrative Court’s 2025 DABUS decision, reveal a conceptual tension where the requirement for intellectual creation by a natural person is formally maintained even as AI-assisted practice renders human contributions increasingly nominal. Applying the method of pragmatic genealogy, I reconstruct the historical “need matrices” that shaped the concept of inventor - from Venetian guild economics through Romantic genius ideology to corporate R&D – to evaluate its cognitive presuppositions and identify the practical needs it serves. On this basis, I argue that instead of extending inventorship to AI or preserving a hollowed-out requirement for human intellectual labour, we ought to alleviate the mismatch between the inherited concept of inventor and modern technological capacities by disaggregating the multiple functional roles we need the concept to discharge.
About Matthieu
Matthieu Queloz is a Privatdozent at the University of Bern and an Ambizione Fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation. Before that, he spent three years at Oxford, where he was a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College and a member of the Faculty of Philosophy. In 2022, he was awarded the Amerbach Prize of the University of Basel and the Lauener Prize for Up-and-Coming Philosophers. As of 2027, he will hold an SNSF Professorship (Starting Grant) and lead a five-year project on artificial cognition. He is the author of The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering (OUP 2021) and The Ethics of Conceptualization: Tailoring Thought and Language to Need (OUP 2025).