On October 31, 2025, Director Squires spoke to the American Intellectual Property Law Association and provided a forceful statement on his view for the direction of patent law. Of particular interest were his comments on patent eligibility.
In the previous Trump administration, Director Iancu had instructed patent examiners to focus on whether patent claims had a practical application. Director Squires has now articulated an approach that is consistent with Iancu’s guidance but provides three “pillars” of the eligibility analysis:
1. Section 100(b)
Director Squires pointed to the statutory categories of eligible subject matter: “process, machine, manufacture, composition of matter.” These broad categories have been included in all U.S. patent laws since 1793.
2. Enfish and AI subject matter eligibility
Director Squires pointed to the computer data structures at issue in Enfish as eligible. To illustrate, he referred to his recent decision in Ex parte Desjardins. In that case, administrative judges at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had violated the principles of Enfish by evaluating the claims at such a high level of generality that they “essentially equated any machine learning with an unpatentable ‘algorithm’” and considered the remaining elements “generic computer components.” Director Squires promised that more formal “guidance” to USPTO examiners will be provided to avoid this problem.
In the Ex parte Desjardins decision itself, he explained: “This case demonstrates that [35 U.S.C.] §§ 102, 103 and 112 are the traditional and appropriate tools to limit patent protection to its proper scope. These statutory provisions should be the focus of examination.”
3. Something More (O’Reilly v. Morse)
Director Squires referred to the Alice and Mayo Supreme Court decisions, which state patent eligibility requires a claim to “something more” than simply the building blocks of human ingenuity. To illustrate, he pointed to Morse Code. Samuel Morse was disallowed from broadly claiming electromagnetism “for making or printing intelligible characters, signs or letters at any distances” (Claim 8), but he was allowed to claim the “system of signs, consisting of dots and spaces, and of dots, spaces, and horizontal lines, for numerals, letters, words, or sentences” he devised to communicate electromagnetically over a wire (Claim 5). The system of Morse Code was a practical application of the related law of nature.
Director Squires touted the issuance of the following patents as eligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101:
- S. Patent No. 12,419,201 for Materials and Methods for Performing Histochemical Assays For Human Pro-Epiregulin and Amiphiregulin; and
- S. Patent No. 12,419,202 for Systems and Methods For Generating An Architecture For Production of Goods and Services.
Based on these statements by Director Squires, look for the USPTO to shortly issue guidance to examiners that revives or reinvigorates the “practical application” standard, consistent with Director Iancu’s approach.
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