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ARTICLE · 19 JANUARY 2022

Update On Artificial Intelligence As A Patent Inventor

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On appeal, Thaler argues for an expansive reading of the Patent Act's inventorship requirement on both technical and policy grounds.

United StatesIntellectual Property
Xin Hu Rasmussen
Xin Hu Rasmussen
Baldassare Vinti
Baldassare Vinti
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Our previous blog posts, Artificial Intelligence as the Inventor of Life Sciences Patents? and Update on Artificial Intelligence: Court Rules that AI Cannot Qualify As "Inventor," discuss recent inventorship issues surrounding AI and its implications for life sciences innovations. Continuing our series, we now look at the appeal recently filed by Stephen Thaler ("Thaler") in his quest to obtain a patent for an invention created by AI in the absence of a traditional human inventor. 

As we previously reported, on September 3, 2021, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that an AI machine cannot qualify as an "inventor" under the Patent Act, in a case that Thaler filed seeking, among other things, an order compelling the USPTO to reinstate his patent applications. Those patent applications name an AI system called "Device for Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience" aka "DABUS," as the sole inventor. Thaler, who developed DABUS,

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