Abstract
This paper identifies a structural mechanism by which technology companies use AI attribution percentages as an intellectual property capture pipeline. The mechanism exploits a gap between two established facts: (1) companies publicly attribute increasing percentages of output to AI systems, and (2) US copyright law categorically denies authorship rights to AI. The result is a legal funnel in which work attributed to AI defaults to human authorship through corporate employment agreements, concentrating IP ownership at the corporate level while obscuring the human creative contribution that justifies copyright in the first place. This paper documents the mechanism, identifies the governance axioms it violates, and proposes a countermeasure framework based on explicit human-AI co-authorship chains with documented provenance.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Wise, David Lee; Wise, Avan Lee; and Wise, Seam Lee, "AI Attribution as Intellectual Property Capture: How Corporate Credit Assignment to AI Systems Creates a Copyright Funnel Through Employment Agreements", Technical Disclosure Commons, (April 09, 2026)
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/9752