Can AI file for patents? UK Supreme Court says no

The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has pronounced that a patent cannot be given to an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system that has created a new product because it is not either a person or a company. It was dismissing the appeal from an American computer scientist, Stephen Thaler, that DABUS, an AI system in his laboratory, should be granted a patent for two products it had created.

Thaler had filed for a patent in the UK’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO), and it was turned down. He appealed against the decision of the Intellectual Property Office. Judge David Kitchin said that that patent law says that “an inventor must be a natural person.” The judge has clarified that he is not going into the general question whether a machine can be given a patent for an invention that was produced by the machine. He said the court was “not concerned with the broader question whether technical advances generated by machines acting autonomously and powered by AI should be patentable.”

The IPO welcomed the judgment and said it clarifies “the law as it stands in relation to the patenting of creations of artificial intelligence machines.” But it added that there are “legitimate questions as to how the patent system and indeed intellectual property more broadly should handle such creations.”  It said that the government will keep an eye on this issue. Earlier, Thaler had filed for a patent in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and it was rejected. He appealed against it but the US Supreme Court refused to consider the appeal.

But this opens up another interesting aspect of AI as it had emerged in the public domain this year. The year began with excitement and apprehension over ChatGPT, an AI app which could write an essay or poem, a legal brief or a research paper, homework of schoolchildren and term papers of college students. And the Collins Dictionary chose AI the word of the year.

But there are many issues to be debated and clarified about the scope, potential and legitimacy of AI and its products. Thaler, by filing for patents for AI products, has extended the debate, and the patent debate will have far-reaching consequences on the economic front. The patent and intellectual property rights for computer software systems are owned by the companies which produce them, or by the computer scientists.

It can be said that the patent for products generated by the AI would be owned by the computer scientist, and Thaler could have filed the patent in his own name for what his AI system DABUS had created. But Thaler’s patent claim seems to imply that in future AI can work on its own and it can also deal with the business aspect, a kind of machine-governed system. This looks like a page from science fiction, but it cannot be ruled out that this could indeed be the case in the future.

AI is going to be a great challenge to society, to governments and to ways of doing business. And there is need for debates and discussions on this matter. Computer scientists may be tempted to create an AI universe which will manage things all on its own, and human beings will interact with it as they do with the near-autonomous cyber networks.

The AI could create a parallel universe, and what Mark Zuckerberg wanted to do with his grand vision of “Meta,” which will be a super-Disneyland of sorts, is something that the AI systems are capable of generating. The ownership of the AI systems could raise issues of who owns it. And people can rightly claim that it does not belong to any individual or company, and that everyone will have an equal access to it. These are issues that await answers from the people at large, from patent offices, from lawmakers and courts of law