What are your opinions on authorship being contingent on positive data?

For example, someone spends months designing experiments and collecting data in system B to corroborate data from system A, which is person A’s project.

Despite months of effort, the phenomenon just does not reproduce in system B and thus none of the data support the hypothesis from A. Behind the scenes of paper-in-progress, this has significantly adjusted the way the lab thinks about this overall phenomenon.

PI’s approach is that since no hypothesis-supporting positive data were generated, the negative data are basically ignored and person who worked in system B is excluded from the paper. System B is also the more “native” system, system A being in culture.

What are your thoughts on this?