Federal Circuit Agrees with the USPTO: an AI System Cannot be an Inventor

Attorney: Kurt M. Berger, Ph.D.
August 16, 2022

The Federal Circuit recently affirmed a decision in the Eastern District of Virginia holding that the Patent Act unambiguously requires an inventor to be a natural person.<... Read more

Update on DABUS: Can an AI Machine be an Inventor?

Attorney: Kurt M. Berger, Ph.D.
October 18, 2021

As previously discussed in this blog (see Creation vs. Conception: Can an AI Machines be an Inventor?) some AI researchers believe that the output of certain sophisticated AI software can represent a new invention conceived of, not by the author, user, or trainer of the software, but by the software itself, and that the software or the “AI machine” should be listed as the inventor on a patent application for the new invention. This AI-machine-as-inventor proposition is currently being tested by Dr. Stephen Thaler via the filing of patent applications in over a dozen countries for inventions allegedly invented by a neural-network-based AI machine (“DABUS”), and the listing of the inventor as “DABUS” on the application (with Dr. Thaler listed as the applicant and assignee).  At the time of our previous posts last fall, the USPTO, the EPO, and the UKIPO each objected to listing DABUS as the inventor since DABUS is not a natural person.<... Read more

Drafting Claims for Supervised Machine-Learning Systems

Attorney: Kurt M. Berger, Ph.D.
April 16, 2021

        Supervised machine-learning models are at the heart of some of the biggest advances in artificial intelligence (AI) that have emerged in the past decade. This post revisits the nuts and bolts of drafting claims in this area, and includes two different industry examples of implementing supervised machine learning: medical imaging and speech detection.<... Read more

Using AI to Track AI Patents at the USPTO

Attorney: Kurt M. Berger, Ph.D.
November 12, 2020

According to a new study just released by the Office of the Chief Economist at the USPTO (“Inventing AI: Tracing the diffusion of artificial intelligence with U.S. patents”), the number of annual AI applications filed at the USPTO more than doubled between 2002 to 2018, with broad growth across all technologies, inventor-patentees, and organizations. The USPTO performed the study to determine “whether AI technologies are growing in volume and, importantly, whether they are diffusing across a broad spectrum of technical areas, inventors, companies, and geographies.”  See page 2.<... Read more

Creation vs. Conception: Can an AI Machine be an Inventor?

Attorney: Kurt M. Berger, Ph.D.
October 28, 2020

Computational Creativity, a new subfield of Artificial Intelligence (AI), is the study of software that mimics human creativity. AI researchers in this field are designing software to paint pictures, write poems, and compose music. In science and engineering, some believe that the output of certain sophisticated AI software can represent a new invention conceived of, not by the author, user, or trainer of the software, but by the software itself, and that the software or the "AI machine" should be listed as the inventor on a patent application for the new invention.... Read more