Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

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Artificial intelligence and machine learning law covering patents on models and algorithms, ownership of AI-generated outputs, training data licensing, and compliance with new AI regulation, handled by attorneys who write code and read the research.

AI and machine learning move faster than the law, which is exactly why you want counsel who understands both. Our attorneys came out of software engineering, so when you describe your model architecture, training pipeline, or inference stack, we follow it without a translator. We help AI and ML companies protect what they build, license data cleanly, and stay ahead of regulation that keeps shifting under everyone's feet.

Patents, Models, and Outputs

AI raises ownership questions that off-the-shelf IP playbooks do not answer. We advise on what is patentable in your algorithms and training methods, who owns AI-generated content and inference outputs, and when a trade secret protects your weights and architecture better than a patent ever could. We also handle open-source license obligations baked into common ML frameworks, so a permissive-sounding dependency does not quietly compromise your proprietary stack.

Training Data and Licensing

Your model is only as defensible as the data behind it. We draft and negotiate training data licenses, scrutinize the provenance and usage rights of datasets you acquire or scrape, and structure agreements that spell out who may use outputs and derivatives. When you sell or embed your model, we write the development and service agreements that allocate data rights, performance expectations, and indemnities so that a downstream dispute does not land on you.

AI Regulation and Compliance

Rules for AI are arriving from many directions at once. We help you map obligations under the EU AI Act's risk-based tiers, track US state and federal AI initiatives, and apply sector-specific requirements in healthcare, finance, and transportation. We translate algorithmic accountability and transparency mandates into concrete steps your product and engineering teams can actually ship, rather than a policy document that sits unread in a shared drive.

Governance and Risk

Regulators, customers, and the public increasingly expect AI you can explain and defend. We help you build governance frameworks, bias testing and mitigation practices, and explainability documentation that hold up under scrutiny. We also work through the harder questions: who is liable when an AI decision goes wrong, how to allocate that risk across your contracts, and what your insurance and indemnification position should look like before something breaks.

Frequently asked questions

You often can patent ML inventions, but you need to claim more than the math. Tie the model to a concrete technical improvement or application, such as a specific architecture that reduces compute, a novel training method, or a system that solves a real-world problem, rather than reciting an abstract algorithm. The way the claims are drafted is what usually decides whether you survive an eligibility rejection, so the technical detail you give your attorney matters.

Purely AI-generated output generally can't be registered for copyright in the US, because the Copyright Office requires human authorship. You can still own and control outputs through contracts and terms of use, and material with meaningful human authorship in the selection, arrangement, or editing may be protectable. Set ownership and license terms with your users explicitly so there's no ambiguity about who can use what.

Possibly. Even publicly accessible data can carry copyright, database rights, privacy obligations, or website terms of service that prohibit scraping, and the fair use question for training is being actively litigated. The safer path is to document your data sources, prefer licensed or properly cleared datasets for anything commercial, and assess copyrighted content separately from personal data. We can help you build a data provenance record that holds up if you're ever challenged.

It depends on where you operate and how risky your use case is, but common themes include transparency to users, documentation of training data and model behavior, human oversight, and bias testing for high-impact uses like hiring or credit. Frameworks like the EU AI Act tier obligations by risk level, so a chatbot and a medical-decision tool face very different rules. Start by classifying each AI system you deploy, then map the specific obligations that attach to each tier.

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