UK Patent Office Updates Guidelines On Patenting AI

The UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) has this week published new Guidelines on patenting of inventions that relate to artificial intelligence (AI) inventions. This follows the new Practice Note on the patenting of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), that we reported here on 1 December 2023. These changes were necessitated by the decision of the UK Patent Cout in Emotional Perception AI Ltd. v Comptroller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks that we have already reported.

The Guidelines follow the Practice Note in saying that Examiners should not object to inventions involving ANNs under the "program for a computer" exclusion. These in turn follow the Court's judgment that an ANN may be implemented in hardware or in software which emulates such hardware, and that while both implementations involve a computer, neither involves a computer program. Accordingly, with patent claims explicitly drawn to an ANN, the court held as a matter of construction that the