How Thom Tillis Shaped IP and AI Law – and What Happens Next

Thom Tillis is leaving the Senate in January 2027, which gives legal professionals a compressed Q3-and-Q4 2026 window to separate live legislation from legacy inventory. He announced on June 29, 2025, that he would not seek a third term, citing the erosion of bipartisanship as part of his explanation.[1] By June 2026, coverage of his final months was already framing him as a senator counting down the calendar while still trying to move patent reform.[2]

That matters less because Tillis is a retiring Republican from North Carolina than because he built a Senate lane that few other members had treated as a sustained workload. In 2019, he revived the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property after roughly 12 years of dormancy and held 12 hearings in his first year as chair.[3] By the 119th Congress, the docket tied to him included the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act, the PREVAIL Act, the NO FAKES Act, the PREPARED for AI Act, the Tackling Predatory Litigation Funding Act, and the Litigation Funding Transparency Act.

The bills do not have the same odds. Patent eligibility and Patent Trial and Appeal Board reform still carry the weight of years of doctrinal and stakeholder conflict. Federal AI procurement rules and litigation-funding disclosure have a cleaner institutional path. The useful question for legal readers is not whether Tillis has been influential; the record already answers that. The question is which parts of his agenda can survive a short calendar without him in the chair.

The Five-Month Map

A Senate calendar does not reward conceptual importance. It rewards bills that have a committee lane, sponsors who can explain them quickly, opponents who can be narrowed, and text that can be attached, negotiated, or reported without consuming the chamber. Tillis’s remaining agenda divides along that line.

PERA Is the Signature Fight, and the Hardest One

The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act is the purest expression of Tillis’s IP project. It is aimed at the uncertainty created by the Supreme Court’s Alice/Mayo line of patent-eligibility cases and would replace judge-made exceptions with five statutory exclusions.[4] For patent counsel, this is not an academic clean-up bill. Eligibility doctrine affects claim drafting, prosecution strategy, validity opinions, licensing leverage, and early dispositive motions.

Tillis has also framed PERA as a competitiveness measure, including in relation to artificial intelligence and China.[4] That argument is politically useful, but it does not dissolve the bill’s domestic conflict. Supporters, including former USPTO Directors Andrei Iancu and David Kappos through the Council for Innovation Promotion, see eligibility reform as necessary to restore predictability.[5] Critics have warned that broadening eligibility could strengthen low-quality patents or revive litigation risks for software developers and smaller technology companies, with opposition noted from groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Engine.[6]

The strongest case for PERA is not that every affected industry agrees. They do not. The stronger case is that the status quo has been unstable enough to draw sustained institutional attention, including the reported observation that all 12 judges of the Federal Circuit had, by 2021, lamented the condition of patent-eligibility law.[6] That is the kind of record a committee entrepreneur can build around. It is not, by itself, a floor strategy.

The timing problem is severe. A patent-eligibility bill changes litigation incentives across software, diagnostics, biotechnology, manufacturing, and emerging AI systems. Every narrowing amendment can change the coalition. Every broad phrase can become a future motion-to-dismiss fight. Reports in July 2026 about possible PERA amendments should be treated cautiously because the available material does not confirm final text.[7] Until actual bill language is public and aligned with a committee path, amendment chatter is not the same thing as legislative movement.

PREVAIL Has the Same Calendar Problem With a Different Constituency

The PREVAIL Act sits beside PERA because both try to re-balance the patent system after years of disputes over validity, enforcement, and administrative review. Where PERA targets eligibility doctrine, PREVAIL focuses on Patent Trial and Appeal Board practice and the relationship between administrative challenges and district-court litigation.[6]

For patent owners, PTAB reform can look like a correction to duplicative or strategically abusive validity challenges. For frequent defendants, especially in technology sectors, it can look like an effort to weaken a cheaper validity-testing mechanism. Those positions have economic consequences. A company deciding whether to settle, fight through inter partes review, or reserve arguments for district court is not debating administrative law in the abstract.

PREVAIL’s obstacle is therefore not lack of seriousness. It is that the bill asks Congress to settle a patent-system design fight that has already produced organized constituencies. In a full Congress with a stable subcommittee champion, that is difficult. In the last months before Tillis exits, it becomes harder unless the bill is narrowed or moved as part of a negotiated package.

AI Procurement Is a More Plausible Lane

The PREPARED for AI Act is a different kind of bill. Rather than trying to settle the whole argument over AI regulation, it creates a risk-classification framework for federal AI procurement and requires agencies to assess rights, safety, and civil-liberties impacts before purchasing AI systems.[8] Tillis co-sponsored it with Sen. Gary Peters, giving the bill a bipartisan structure from the start.[8]

That narrower design matters. Federal procurement is already a government-management function. Agencies buy tools, lawyers review contracts, procurement officers manage risk, and inspectors general can ask whether rules were followed. A bill that tells agencies how to classify AI risk before buying systems does not need to preempt the entire state regulatory field or answer every private-sector liability question.

Tillis’s AI record also contains a revealing outlier. In July 2025, he was the sole Senate vote to preserve a proposed 10-year federal moratorium on state AI regulation; the provision was stripped from the larger bill, leaving the vote with no practical legal effect.[9] The vote aligned him more closely with major AI companies than with the rest of the Senate on that specific preemption question.[9]

That episode should not be overread. It does not mean every Tillis AI bill is a maximal deregulatory project. It does show that he is willing to support strong federal control over AI governance when he believes fragmented state rules threaten national markets. The PREPARED for AI Act channels that instinct into a narrower procurement framework, which is why its path looks more realistic than a broad moratorium or a comprehensive AI code.

NO FAKES Shows Reach, Not Necessarily Momentum

The NO FAKES Act belongs in the same map because it shows how far Tillis’s technology-policy work has extended beyond patents. The bill addresses digital replicas and protections for voice and likeness in an AI environment, a subject that pulls together entertainment, copyright-adjacent rights, platform governance, and generative-AI deployment.[10]

Its near-term path is harder to judge from the available materials. The policy problem is real, and the subject has public salience. But salience is not the same as a cleared Senate route. Unless negotiators have already resolved questions around scope, exceptions, platforms, remedies, and interaction with state law, NO FAKES is more useful here as evidence of Tillis’s tech-policy range than as the most likely end-of-2026 enactment.

Litigation Funding Disclosure Has the Cleanest Institutional Case

Tillis’s litigation-funding package is less doctrinally glamorous than PERA, but it may be more legislatively durable. The package has two parts: a tax bill aimed at third-party litigation funding profits and a disclosure bill for federal class actions and multidistrict litigation.[11] The policy premise is that courts, parties, and sometimes clients may not know enough about who is financing litigation and who benefits from settlement pressure.

The market context gives the issue force. The U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform described a $15 billion third-party litigation funding market and cited a leading firm with 355% asset growth, including nearly $1 billion from an undisclosed foreign sovereign wealth fund.[11] Those figures come from an institutional critic of litigation funding, so they should be read as part of an advocacy case rather than a neutral census. Still, they explain why the issue attracts judges, defense-side institutions, tax-policy groups, and national-security arguments.

The tax bill has a chronology worth keeping straight. Tillis’s Tackling Predatory Litigation Funding Act was initially described with a 40.8% tax rate on certain litigation-funding profits; later materials described a revised 31.8% rate.[11] That is not a contradiction to dramatize. It is what tax proposals often look like as sponsors adjust design, revenue treatment, and coalition acceptability.

The disclosure bill has the simpler argument. A federal class action or MDL already concentrates claims, lawyers, courts, and settlement leverage. Requiring disclosure of third-party funding arrangements in that setting can be framed as case-management information rather than a full attack on financing. That does not make it noncontroversial; funders and plaintiffs’ lawyers can argue that disclosure invites tactical abuse or chills access to capital. But compared with rewriting patent eligibility, a disclosure rule is easier to explain, easier to cabin, and easier to attach to a judicial-process package.

The Bipartisan Label Is Useful Only When It Identifies Machinery

Tillis is often described as a moderate Republican who works across the aisle, and that description is partly useful because it matches the sponsorship pattern of much of his legal-policy work.[2] But bipartisanship is not a magic word. It matters when it produces co-sponsors, committee hearings, stakeholder letters, and a bill text that can survive mark-up.

His broader record also shows an institutional streak that does not always map neatly onto party leadership. His opposition to the SAVE Act’s procedural path, discussed in this site’s coverage of why the SAVE Act keeps failing despite GOP control, fits the same pattern: process objections can matter to him even when the political branding points the other way. That helps explain why his IP and litigation work has often focused on forums, standards, disclosures, and review structures rather than only on ideological signaling.

Industry interviews should still be handled carefully. Tillis’s statements about intellectual property in an Intellectual Property Owners Association Q&A help show how he explains his philosophy to rights holders, but the venue has its own perspective.[12] That does not make the statements useless. It means they should be read as part of the pro-IP coalition record, not as independent evidence that any particular reform has solved its opposition problem.

What His Exit Changes

Tillis’s retirement does not erase the need for patent-eligibility clarity, PTAB reform, AI procurement rules, digital-replica protections, or litigation-funding transparency. It changes the sponsor environment. A senator who revived a dormant IP subcommittee and kept these subjects on the hearing calendar is not easily replaced by a member who merely votes yes at the end.

The largest succession risk is in patent law. PERA and PREVAIL require someone willing to absorb technical detail, manage hostile stakeholder letters, and keep returning to the same statutory language after each round of objections. Without that kind of sponsor, the bills can remain important and still stall.

AI procurement and litigation funding are different. The PREPARED for AI Act has a narrower federal-management frame and bipartisan sponsorship. Litigation-funding disclosure has institutional backers and a procedural hook that courts and Congress can understand without reopening all of civil litigation. Those bills still need calendar space, but they do not depend as heavily on persuading the Senate to settle years of patent-system conflict.

The practical judgment is uneven by design. Tillis’s exit makes contentious patent reform more fragile. It leaves better prospects for federal AI procurement governance and litigation-funding transparency. And it creates an unresolved leadership vacuum for Senate IP and technology policy after 2026, precisely because Tillis treated those subjects as committee work rather than occasional talking points.

References

1. Thom Tillis, Wikipedia
2. Tillis races to pass landmark patent legislation before retirement, MLex, June 2026
3. Tillis to Chair Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property for the 119th Congress, Office of U.S. Senator Thom Tillis
4. Tillis, Coons Introduce Patent Eligibility Restoration Act, Office of U.S. Senator Thom Tillis
5. Former USPTO Directors Andrei Iancu and David Kappos Support Patent Eligibility Restoration Act, Council for Innovation Promotion
6. Patent Eligibility Restoration Act Reintroduced in Congress, Crowell & Moring
7. PERA Amendments Report, IPWatchdog, July 2026
8. Peters, Tillis Introduce Bipartisan Bill to Establish Risk-Based Framework for Federal AI Procurement, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee
9. Senate removes AI regulation ban from Trump tax-cut bill, Reuters, July 1, 2025
10. NO FAKES Act, Office of U.S. Senator Thom Tillis
11. Tillis Introduces Legislation to Combat Predatory Litigation Funding, U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform
12. Q&A with Senator Thom Tillis, Intellectual Property Owners Association