AI Intellectual Property Strategy
Your competitive moat in AI is a mix of patents, trade secrets, copyright, and contract. We help companies and research labs secure that moat: patenting novel architectures and training techniques, protecting model weights and proprietary datasets as trade secrets, clarifying copyright in AI-assisted and AI-generated works, and structuring licenses for foundation models and fine-tunes.
Who this is for
AI startups monetizing IP, foundation model labs, enterprise AI teams, research institutions, and investors diligencing IP portfolios in AI transactions.
What you get
- Patent landscape review and prosecution strategy for AI inventions
- Trade secret programs for model weights, data pipelines, and eval harnesses
- Copyright strategy for training data, outputs, and human-AI collaborations
- Foundation model, dataset, and API licensing frameworks
- Ownership and assignment hygiene for employee and contractor contributions
- IP diligence support in M&A, financing, and partnership transactions
Frequently asked questions
Can AI-generated content be copyrighted?
Copyright generally requires human authorship. Outputs with sufficient human creative control may be protectable; purely machine-generated content typically is not. The practical path is documenting human contribution, allocating ownership by contract, and using copyright plus trade secret and contract protections together.
Should we patent our model architecture?
It depends on novelty, disclosure strategy, and how much of your advantage is architectural versus data and operational. We run a landscape review first — many AI advantages are better protected as trade secrets than patents, especially where reverse engineering is hard and publication would erode the edge.
How do we protect model weights as trade secrets?
With documented access controls, need-to-know systems, employee and contractor agreements, vendor confidentiality terms, logging, and operational discipline around who can export weights. Courts look for reasonable measures — informal practices are not enough once litigation starts.