Following years of a hype about artificial intelligence (AI) and a global competitive race for its development, the year 2021 marked a turning point as regulators and lawmakers around the globe increasingly turned their focus on ethical concerns and potentially harmful effects of AI systems. Exemplifying the global concerns, it was in November 2021 that the 193 members of the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) adopted the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence as a potential global standard-setting instrument for the regulation of AI. The UNESCO Recommendation explicitly emphasizes the profound and dynamic positive and negative impacts that artificial intelligence (AI) may have in a variety of fields but particularly on the human mind. The latter can be regarded as the primary source of all creative works that are protected by intellectual property (IP) laws and therefore requires specific attention in any future regulatory act on AI. As for the impact of AI on IP, in particular, the UNESCO Recommendation states that “Member States should foster new research at the intersection between AI and intellectual property (IP). To this end, the paper will discuss the primary challenges posed by AI to the foundations of IP laws, which include the questions of “freedom of thought”, “free will” and “originality”, as well as those posed by AI for IP law in the future, such as the protection of works created by means of Al technologies or the permission of copyright law for the training of foundation models. Last, the paper concludes by critically examining the principal purpose of IP law in a future global economy.