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By Jeffrey S. Ginsberg and Abhishek Bapna
September 01, 2022

Federal Circuit Affirms District Court's Decision That an Artificial Intelligence Software System Cannot Be Listed as an Inventor on a Patent Application

On Aug. 5, 2022, a Federal Circuit panel of Judges Moore, Taranto, and Stark issued a unanimous opinion, authored by Judge Stark, in Thaler v. Vidal, Case No. 2021-2347. The panel affirmed the Eastern District of Virginia's determination that an artificial intelligence (AI) software system cannot be listed as an inventor on a patent application. Slip Op. at 2.

Stephen Thaler (Thaler) develops and runs AI systems that generate potential inventions. Id. at 2. In July 2019, he filed two patent applications with the PTO on which he listed an AI system as the sole inventor. Id. at 3. Thaler represented that he did not contribute to the conception of these inventions and that any person having skill in the art could have taken the AI system's output and reduced the ideas in the applications to practice. Id. He also submitted the following documents relevant to inventorship: 1) a sworn oath on behalf of the AI system's behalf to satisfy 35 U.S.C. §115's requirement; 2) a supplemental "Statement on Inventorship" explanation that the AI system is a "particular type of connectionist artificial intelligence"; and 3) an assignment purporting to grant himself all of the AI system's rights as an inventor. Id. at 3-4.

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