AI As An Inventor? . . . Not So Fast

In December, the United Kingdom (the "U.K.") became the fourth jurisdiction to reach a final determination that a generative AI platform could not be named as an inventor on a patent. Like courts in the United States, Australia and Taiwan before it, the U.K. Supreme Court relied on statutory language to hold that "an inventor within the meaning of the 1977 [U.K. Patent] Act must be a natural person and [the AI] is not a person at all, let alone a natural person." Thaler v. Comptroller-General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks, [2023] UKSC 49, 14.

In each instance the court was asked to consider a patent presented by Dr. Stephen Thaler as part of his Artificial Inventor Project (the "AIP") where Dr. Thaler named his AI platform, DABUS, as the sole inventor. Dr. Thaler and AIP have initiated test cases in eighteen jurisdictions around the world seeking intellectual property rights, i.e., patents and copyrights,¹ for AI-generated output without a traditional human