Federal Circuit Holds Patentability Requires More Than Just "Use AI"

In an important decision, Recentive Analytics, Inc. v. Fox Corp., et al., No. 2023-2437 (Fed. Cir. Apr. 18, 2025), the Federal Circuit held that "patents that do no more than claim the application of generic machine learning to new data environments, without disclosing improvements to the machine learning models to be applied, are patent ineligible under § 101."

Recentive sued the Fox defendants, alleging infringement of four software patents. Two of the patents claimed machine learning training for scheduling live events, and the other two claimed generating a network map using a machine learning technique for broadcasters to determine what content is displayed for channels at particular geographic markets and at particular times. The district court found all four patents invalid under 35 U.S.C. §101. On appeal, Recentive argued that the claims were eligible based on the application of machine learning resulting in improvements that generated automatically