Executive Summary: Artificial-intelligence inventions are patentable in both the United States and China, but neither jurisdiction protects “AI” as an abstract label or rewards generic use of a known model in a new field. U.S. practice applies the Alice/Mayo eligibility framework, with current USPTO guidance emphasizing the claim as a whole, a specific improvement to technology, and evidence connecting that improvement to the claimed mechanism; properly supported declarations

Executive Summary: A deliberate prefiling prior-art search can serve as a specification-design tool, not merely a patentability screen. By identifying “framing references,” accurately describing their architectures and limitations, and tying each distinction to a claimed technical mechanism, an applicant can create an intrinsic record that supports patent eligibility under 35 U.S.C. § 101 and informs later claim construction. That record may allow the patent owner to demonst

Executive Summary: The article explains why Korean software and AI patent applications that appear eligible under Korean law may still face significant obstacles under U.S. patent-eligibility doctrine. Korean law focuses on whether the claimed invention is a “technical idea utilizing laws of nature” and, for software-related inventions, whether software-based information processing is concretely realized using hardware. U.S. law, by contrast, asks whether the claim falls with

Executive Summary: This article argues that Subject Matter Eligibility Declarations (“SMEDs”) can be valuable prosecution tools for building a factual record in response to § 101 rejections, but only if they are used with discipline. A SMED should not ask an inventor or expert to declare that claims are patent eligible; rather, it should provide claim-tethered, corroborated technical facts showing how a person of ordinary skill in the art would understand the specification an

I. Introduction The recent Federal Circuit cases on patent eligibility do not simply show that U.S. law has become hostile to particular technologies. They show something more specific and more institutional: the United States often asks threshold eligibility doctrine to perform work that other patent systems assign to inventive step, enablement, support, or claim clarity. The point is not that those other systems are necessarily more generous. They may be demanding in differ