Record the human conception before the AI runs

On 26 November 2025 the US Patent and Trademark Office issued revised guidance on inventorship for AI-assisted inventions, replacing its February 2024 guidance. There is no special test for them: only natural persons can be named as inventors, and inventorship still turns on conception, the formation in the inventor's mind of a definite and permanent idea of the complete and operative invention. The European Patent Office likewise requires the inventor to be a human being.

So when an AI tool is part of the work, the question that can come up later is simple to ask and hard to answer: what had the person conceived, and when? Patent practitioners writing about the guidance advise recording the human contribution, the problem framing, the approach and the key design choices, before the AI tools run.

The method: two dated records

1. Write the conception note. The problem, your idea for solving it, the choices that make it work, and what you are about to ask the AI to do. Save it as a file: a PDF, a text file, a lab notebook export.
2. Seal it before you prompt. Open the checker and choose the file. It never leaves your device; only its SHA-256 fingerprint is sent. The fingerprint gets an RFC 3161 timestamp from an independent authority, a Bitcoin anchor and a line on an append-only public ledger.
3. Seal what the AI produced, afterwards. The session transcript, the generated design or code. Two records, in order, show the sequence: what you had before the tool ran, and what came out of it.
4. Keep both files exactly as they were. Anyone you later show them to recomputes the fingerprints and checks the dates with the open-source verifier, with our servers switched off.

If an AI agent does the work, it can seal its own steps in the same way: one call to POST /api/certifications/hash with the SHA-256, or notarize_hash over MCP. Free, no account.

What this does not do

A timestamp proves that these exact bytes existed at that moment. It does not decide who the inventor is, whether a note amounts to a complete conception, or whether anything is patentable, and in a first-inventor-to-file system an early conception date does not by itself give priority. What counts, and how much weight a record carries, differs by country and by case; ask a patent attorney where you file. The limits of a certificate are written out here.

Seal a conception note now or read how to timestamp an invention or a trade secret. Free, no account, and the file stays with you.

Sources: USPTO, Revised Inventorship Guidance for AI-Assisted Inventions (26 November 2025; Federal Register, 28 November 2025), as summarised by Morgan Lewis (3 December 2025) and Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. This page is not legal advice.