India’s Patent Office Sets Guardrails For AI-Assisted Examination

New Guidelines permit AI to assist patent examination, while keeping substantive judgment, verification and accountability firmly with human officers…

The Office of the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks published the Guidelines for the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Patent Examination Procedures on August 7, 2026, laying down a framework for the use of AI in patent examination. The Guidelines recognise AI’s limitations, including the importance of prompt discipline and hallucinations, and emphasise that AI should assist, not replace, the Examiner’s or Controller’s judgment.

The Guidelines permit cautious AI assistance across a range of examination tasks, including prior art searches, preliminary assessment of sufficiency of disclosure, and improving the language of draft office communications. However, they prohibit, among other things, uploading unpublished application contents or confidential office material to public AI tools, relying on AI as a substitute