The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published a decision in the last week of April stating that patent claims by artificial intelligence (AI) cannot be processed since they cannot be inventors. The decision states that only “natural persons” have the right to get a patent.

Last year, DABUS, an AI system made two inventions, albeit mundane - one for a shape-shifting food container and another for an emergency flashlight. This threw up an existential question in the international patent regulation discussions around the world - does an inventor necessarily have to be human? 

Until now, the USPTO was vague about the difference between man and the machine when it came to inventing since an “individual” is referred to as an inventor. Stephen Thaler, physicist and the creator of DABUS, argued that it wouldn’t be right for Thaler to be listed as the inventor because he didn’t help DABUS make its inventions. “If I teach my PhD student that and they go on to make a final complex idea, that doesn’t make me an inventor on their patent, so it shouldn’t with the machine,” Ryan Abbott, a law and health-sciences professor at the University of Surrey in the UK who led the group of legal experts in the AI patent project, told the Wall Street Journal last year.

The group has filed similar patents, with DABUS as their inventor, in Europe and the UK. The regions have denied DABUS parenthood for similar reasons related to personhood. The European Patent Office how rights will be granted to an inventor under such a circumstance. The US too took a similar stand by declaring that “only natural persons may be named as an inventor in a patent application.”