Pervasive AI use adds newfound importance to longstanding debates over patent timing and reliability. Patent claims on speculative ideas generated by AI, or even the infusion of speculative AI-generated ideas into the public domain, may defeat patent incentives for more careful research. Although challenges that AI use poses for patent validity requirements like human inventorship and nonobviousness have received more attention, reliability is equally important. 

Indeed, as this Article argues, the issues are linked. If requirements for inventorship and nonobviousness were adjusted to emphasize reliability, a human role could be preserved, and AI use would not necessarily threaten patents. Currently, as empirical evidence presented in this Article shows, the fear of imperiling patents may be chilling normatively desirable transparency about such use.

The path forward requires embracing reliability throughout patent doctrine. In addition to changes to inventorship and nonobviousness doctrine, robust adoption of reliability requires fortification of the utility requirement for securing a patent and a parallel tightening of requirements for the types of information that can be used to thwart patent grants. Longer term, if cost barriers to innovation across fields fall dramatically, certain nonpatent exclusivities may need to play the dominant incentive role. But for the time being AI can provide a powerful catalyst for bolstering a level of reliability the patent system should arguably have had all along.