On Tuesday, December 19th, in a landmark case in the UK, a U.S. computer scientist, Stephen Thaler, lost his attempt to register patents for inventions created by his artificial intelligence (AI) system, DABUS. The UK Intellectual Property Office rejected Thaler’s application, stating that an inventor must be a human or a company, not a machine. Thaler appealed to the UK Supreme Court, which unanimously rejected the appeal, affirming that, under UK patent law, an inventor must be a natural person.
The court ruling does not address the broader question of whether technical advances by autonomously acting machines powered by AI should be patentable. Thaler’s lawyers argue that the judgment highlights the inadequacy of current UK patent law in protecting inventions generated autonomously by AI machines. Thaler faced a similar setback in the United States earlier this year, where the Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to the refusal of patents for AI-generated inventions by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Legal experts suggest that while AI is currently considered a tool and not an agent, this distinction may change in the medium term, requiring a reevaluation of patent laws.
