USPTO Denies Patent Application For Invention By AI

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is the latest patent office to confirm that inventions by artificial intelligence (AI) are not patentable. This is a potential issue for all industries and probably most pressing in Life Sciences, given the growing use of AI in drug discovery.

The USPTO denied an application for a patent that named an AI, called DABUS, as the inventor. The USPTO held that the US patent statutes preclude interpretation of "inventor" to cover machines. The decision does not cite any express statutory limitation, but relies on "the plain reading" of words such as "whoever", "himself", "herself" and "individual" and a statement that an inventor who executes an oath is a "person". The decision cites US case law that inventors cannot be states or corporations. It relies on these cases as authority for the proposition that the "conception" of an invention must be performed by a natural person and it notes that this is consistent with