USPTO Issues AI Subject Matter Eligibility Guidance

Attorney: Sameer Gokhale
July 22, 2024

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued an update to the guidance on patent subject matter eligibility to address artificial intelligence (AI). This update provides further clarity and consistency on how the USPTO and applicants should evaluate subject matter eligibility of claims in patent applications and patents involving inventions related to AI technology.  The guidance update also announces three new examples of how to apply this guidance through a few key technologies. <... Read more

Amgen and AI

Attorney: Sameer Gokhale
December 13, 2022

In the Federal Circuit decision in Amgen Inc. v. Sanofi[1], while invalidating two of Amgen’s antibody patents, the CAFC made the following statement regarding the enablement requirement of 35 U.S.C. §112.<... Read more

AI as a Tool for the "PHOSITA"

Attorney: Sameer Gokhale
January 27, 2022

An ongoing discussion in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and patent law relates to the implications of AI toward the standard for a person having ordinary skill in the art (“PHOSITA”). While the PHOSITA is a legal fiction, resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art is one of the Graham factors enunciated by the Supreme Court in the framework for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. §103.[1] <... Read more

AI and Written Description: When Does an AI Patent Claim Cross the Line?

Attorney: Sameer Gokhale
June 28, 2021

Following Ed Garlepp’s great discussion on AI disclosure issues[1][2], I want to describe a related problem with AI and issues arising under the written description requirement that I often bring up when presenting on this topic. I started raising this topic following an episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley.  One of the characters who lives in the incubator depicted in the show, Jian Yang, pitches an app to venture capitalists called “See Food” which is described as a “Shazam for food.” The user takes a picture of food, and then the app returns an identification of the food.    Eventually Jian Yang does come up with an app that can identify food. The problem: it can only identify “hot dog” and “not hot dog.”  When asked why he only created an app that only recognizes one type of food, Jian Yang explains that identifying more foods will require scraping significantly more images of food from the Internet to use as training data for a computational model.<... Read more

Protecting the Data that Fuels AI

Attorney: Sameer Gokhale
May 28, 2021

Recently, I had the privilege of participating in a couple of virtual conferences as a panelist on issues related to artificial intelligence (AI) and intellectual property (IP). Normally when I participate as a speaker at a conference I speak on many of the issues you may have read in our previous blog posts. I tend to focus heavily on patent prosecution issues in obtaining an AI patent, whether in the U.S. or around the globe. However, these two recent panels had a particular focus on how to protect data as an asset. While the issue of protecting data (or information in general) has long been a grey area issue in the realm of IP, this issue has risen to the forefront due to AI and the rise of “Big Data.” <... Read more