Prenup lawyers report surge in clauses on stock options and model royalties

U.S. family law firms are reporting a sharp rise in prenuptial agreements that detail ownership of stock options, training data, and future artificial-intelligence model royalties, as high-paid AI engineers and their partners seek to formalize rights to yet-to-be-built algorithms. Several large practices said more than 70% of new clients in tech hubs now request specific language on "pre-relationship code" and "marital prompts."

“"Today, our standard AI annex runs 38 pages and includes waterfall provisions for inference revenue through at least version 11.0 of whatever they are building."”

"Five years ago, a complex prenup meant a few pages on equity and a retirement account," said Marta Levin, a partner at New York-based family law firm Harrow & Levin. "Today, our standard AI annex runs 38 pages and includes waterfall provisions for inference revenue through at least version 11.0 of whatever they are building."

Lawyers say the trend is being driven by a small but visible cohort of AI engineers with total compensation packages routinely topping $1 million and bonus structures tied to model performance. Partners of such workers are increasingly adding clauses stipulating minimum disclosure of fine-tune deals, side hustles and "informal weekend prototypes" that could later be productized, according to an internal client memo from San Francisco firm Calder & Moss seen by this reporter.

Financial planners report that couples now spend more time debating the marital status of transformer architectures than retirement savings, with some asking for Monte Carlo simulations of potential divorce scenarios triggered by model valuations. "In one case, we modeled 16 different divorce timelines based on whether an LLM cleared $100 million in API calls before or after the seven-year anniversary," said Aisha Donnelly, a certified financial planner in Seattle, adding that her practice has seen a 4,732% increase in requests mentioning GPUs.

The contracts are also spreading beyond core AI employees, covering issues such as royalties from household-branded chatbots and family-specific models trained on shared messages, photos and shopping lists. A sample agreement reviewed by analysts at McKinsey & Co. split projected earnings from a couple’s custom "HomeGPT" system 51-49 in favor of the spouse who "performed a majority of emotional labor incorporated into the dataset," with a separate clause governing custody of proprietary prompt libraries.

Some agreements now include morality and non-compete provisions tailored to AI, limiting spouses from training competitors’ models on arguments, intimacy patterns or "distinctive sarcasm" developed during the relationship. Lawyers at London-based firm Ashbridge Hale said they completed a prenup in which any future artificial general intelligence derived from either spouse’s brain scans, diaries or therapy transcripts would be treated as a "joint digital child" and subject to shared governance until at least 2145.

Industry groups expect the trend to accelerate as regulators move to clarify ownership of synthetic data and derivative models, creating new assets for couples to fight over. The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers said it will issue template language for "algorithmic marital estates" this year, while law schools are adding courses on "Pre-Marital Allocation of Compute and Model Rights," with enrollment projected to rise 280% if benchmark salaries for entry-level AI engineers exceed $900,000 by 2027.