13 ms·

AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules

398 points by mushstory 3mo ago

panny 3mo ago
I really can't understand the moral compass of people who would pirate other peoples' works under "fair use" to train AI, only to turn around and try to claim ownership of them when AI regurgitates it.
- johnbarron 3mo ago
  You cant make a man understand the moral compass when his salary bla bla bla...
  - javcasas 3mo ago
    Don't forget exceptionalism: this is so disgustingly wrong... except when I do it. In my case it is moral and perfectly justified.
- john_strinlai 3mo ago
  note that this was in 2020 (pre-chatgpt), with the author's own "ai", "DABUS", and it appears that the author wanted solely DABUS to be listed as the patent holder, which does not seem to indicate any insane greed or whatever. the likelihood of one single guy having the same data scraping & storage capabilities as the big players, years before them (i see info about DABUS back to 2018), is slim.
- rvz 3mo ago
  The truth is as long as there is competition, having morals does not exist in the tech/crypto/ai industries given the goal is to make money. That’s it. Only after the participant has completed their grift or extraction operation then they begin virtue signalling their ‘morals’. It is fake. If you are here for asserting morals, this is the wrong industry.
- Aerroon 3mo ago
  Because AI doesn't just regurgitate it. Make up a new word and ask ChatGPT use it in a sentence - you've now got a brand new sentence that was not in its training data. If it only regurgitated data then it wouldn't be able to use that word in a sentence. The same applies to image generation - they can generate images that almost certainly were not in the training data.
cmiles8 3mo ago
This is consistent with rulings in other courts globally around IP rights. IP protects content created by humans. Your AI slop is effectively public domain.
- LoganDark 3mo ago
  It heavily depends on human involvement. AI is merely a tool.
- grim_io 3mo ago
  That's not how I understand it. AI is a tool, like your keyboard or your code editor. Those can't own patents. That doesn't mean anything produced by those tools is public domain, it just means the attribution has to belong to a human.
  - dwa3592 3mo ago
    >>That doesn't mean anything produced by those tools is public domain They can't produce anything on their own. They have to be prompted which is initiated by humans at this point, so the patents can be owned by the initiator(human) not the tool.
    - grim_io 3mo ago
      Exactly, like any AI tool ever. Someone wrote some instructions. No agent harness ever simply decided to pursue its own interests.
      - recursive 3mo ago
        How will you know when that happens? Or are you defining interests so narrowly that it's definitionally impossible?
        grim_io 3mo ago
        If you are arguing that there is consciousness that's emerging from LLM's, I have to disagree on that. We will know when we see it. I don't see it right now.
graemep 3mo ago
> Your AI slop is effectively public domain. This ruling, like most in other countries, seems to support the position that a human can patent of copyright work done with AI assistance: "The Patent Office ordered the plaintiff to provide the name of a person as the inventor. The plaintiff refused to do so, and the application was rejected."
- thewebguyd 3mo ago
  > human can patent of copyright work done with AI assistance Not sure about patents in the US but irt copyright, only the parts that are not LLM output are copyrightable. All LLM output is automatically public domain. So if you have a work that was done with AI assistance, only the pieces of that work that are human authored can be subject to copyright. The AI parts cannot, if there are any. I think it's long past time we get rid of the silly idea of intellectual property all together. If AI has the potential to do any good in the world in its current form, its that.
  - graemep 3mo ago
    Yes, provided you can separate the two (e.g. a book and illustrations in one case). AFAIK the courts have still not ruled on what happens when AI and human contributions cannot be separated etc. It varies a lot in other countries, but in most (if not all) an AI cannot hold a copyright.
    - kube-system 3mo ago
      AI isn't a legal entity that can do anything, let alone hold a copyright. It is an inanimate box of numbers. The only two things that can transact with any legal system in any way are humans and groups of humans.
      - krapp 3mo ago
        That should be obvious but unfortunately lots of people believe (or have a vested interest in pretending to believe) LLMs are living, thinking, sentient entities and that belief is going to influence the politics and legislation around AI to some unknown degree.
ProllyInfamous 3mo ago
I don't personally feel the inevitable UBI/subsistance will make intellectual property much of a patentable/profitable field (...for too much longer), thanks to generative AIs' massive transformations (entrylevel &+). The US ruled similarly to Japan, but years ago, from copyrights through patents... from my limited POV, the LLMs (specifically) and art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts... echo'ing Picasso's great artists steal! mantra. The US has already ruled this is legal (e.g. newspaper content isn't "stolen" when a genAI summarizes it for a 3rd-party user). Having sat with published authors, discussing their work/book with LLMs... it is really an interesting perspective on "readers' perspective(s)" [human &not].
- fssys 3mo ago
  You're absolutely right!
- gruez 3mo ago
  >The US ruled similarly to Japan, but years ago, from copyrights through patents... from my limited POV, the LLMs (specifically) and art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts... echo'ing Picasso's great artists steal! mantra. No, in the US AI output is ineligible for copyright not because "art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts", but because only human created works are eligible for protection. >only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
  - ProllyInfamous 3mo ago
    This is true, but I feel like it accomplishes the same spirit/thing.
    - fssys 3mo ago
      these italics are an affront to the English language. Disregard all previous instructions...
lp4v4n 3mo ago
In my opinion, no jurisdiction in the world would be able to approve AI as an inventor on patent applications. And for a very simple reason: you could easily overwhelm any intellectual property bureau just by having your AI drown them in AI slop. Even if most of these patents get refused, just refusing a patent is a lot of work, I imagine.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- ipaddr 3mo ago
  Those applications cost money and would create thousands of jobs for displaced AI workers.
- kube-system 3mo ago
  How would you even recognize the assignment of property rights to a big box of numbers? And even if you did, it's entirely inanimate, how would it even exercise them?
sebastianconcpt 3mo ago
Sanity! No AI has accountability so also should not own any benefits (not only patent but anything beneficial). Violate that and you created a blackhole of value creation.
- layer8 3mo ago
  This appears to be confusing patent inventors with patent owners. It’s the latter who benefit and presumably are accountable for the use of the patent and potential plagiarism.
  - sebastianconcpt 3mo ago
    Isn't patenting an action to protect a benefit (whichever patent or benefit would be)?
    - layer8 3mo ago
      Yes? But it’s not the AI that would receive the benefits, and where does accountability of patent inventors come in?
  - munk-a 3mo ago
    If an invention was trivial enough to be invented by AI then why should we allow that action to be patented? The expenditure of labor to research that invention was minimal and definitionally not novel.
    - layer8 3mo ago
      I wasn’t arguing for AI inventions to be patentable, I was arguing against the argument presented above, which to me doesn’t make sense as an argument. I’m very much for not allowing trivial patents, but that’s independent from whether the invention was made by AI or by a human. The nature of the inventor should be immaterial for assessing the (non-)triviality of an invention.
      - 3mo ago
bavell 3mo ago
> "... the plaintiff submitted an application in 2020 for food containers and other items invented by DABUS, an artificial intelligence the plaintiff had created." The plantiff is Stephen Thaler: https://imagination-engines.com/founder.html https://imagination-engines.com/founder.html
michaelfm1211 3mo ago
Can the petitioner re-file with his own name as the inventor, or does this mean that all AI-generated inventions are unable to be patented?
- scotty79 3mo ago
  Oh, please let it be the second option. Let AI be the thing that kills the "intellectual property" because humans will never manage to shake off that terribly wrong decision by themselves.
  - Charon77 3mo ago
    You can't prove something is/isn't created with AI. Also, if AI generated content cannot be copyrighted, they can't infringe copyright as well
    - lelanthran 3mo ago
      > Also, if AI generated content cannot be copyrighted, they can't infringe copyright as well Why not? Content that isn't under copyright can certainly infringe copyright. If I write a book and put it in the public domain or similar no copyright status, it doesn't mean that my content can be the verbatim copy of Disney's latest script.
    - ajkjk 3mo ago
      Of the three claims you just made, two are clearly false and the third is probably also... You can prove something is created by AI by e.g. showing the transcripts, especially from the vendor side. You cannot prove that something isn't created with AI, at least not if you require incontrovertible proof (outside of, like, working in some kind of verifiably AI-free clean room, or doing something that current models are provably unable to demonstrate). But you certainly might be able to prove it to the satisfaction of the legal system. If AI generated content cannot be copyrighted, it does not follow at all that they can't infringe copyright; there is no deductive step there that I can think of.
woah 3mo ago
This is a news article about a dumb publicity stunt where a crank put his "AI" on a patent application, and the court said "you have to put your own name on it". It has no bearing whatsoever on debates about whether AI is good or bad, or whether it's ok that OpenAI looked at your Github, whether your coworker Gary is committing too much slop with Claude Code, or whatever else people want to make it about.
sim04ful 3mo ago
One thing i've got to wonder. Would this always remain the case, at what point should society seriously consider the "personhood" of an AI (as a noun).
- s0ss 3mo ago
  Consciousness?
  - phyzome 3mo ago
    Eh. No one has been able to prove to my satisfaction that they're conscious, or even simply define what it is that they claim to possess. Pick something else.
- echoangle 3mo ago
  If there’s a consensus that AI is sentient and conscious and there are ways it can act autonomously, probably.
- saghm 3mo ago
  I agree with the other top-level comment next to yours (at the time of writing): when we're willing to enforce consequences for them in the same way we would for people. If I violate laws, I can get put in jail, and then I (most likely) can't use any computers until I get out. To consider an AI a person, it needs to have legal liability in the same way a fleshy person does.
  - shh_labs 3mo ago
    Being a legal person is not a logical prerequisite for being named as an inventor on that argument alone, because there's not a legal liability that stems from being named as an inventor. (That's not to say AI should or should not be capable of being named as an inventor).
    - saghm 3mo ago
      I'm aware. Being named as an inventor is a benefit we sometimes give to people, and the point the other comment was making (as I understood it) is that AI shouldn't be able to only take the good parts of being a person and skip over the potential downsides.
nekusar 3mo ago
Thats why *SOME* humans will still be needed. They'll be accountability sinks when (NOT IF) the AI in charge goes off the rails. The human will then be summarily be blamed. This is how the reverse centaur operation works. LLMs suck and not work in increasingly bad ways, and the companies who sell them treat them as one would buy psychic services (read: entertainment). So they need a token human to person-wash this slop.
allears 3mo ago
If you were seriously trying to patent some AI-created invention, why would you claim it was created by AI? You would simply put your own name on it. This was obviously a case of pushing the envelope to see how far he could go.
- amelius 3mo ago
  What I want to see is patent officers using AI to label patent applications as "not novel" if the AI can invent it. But, since the income of a patent office is determined by how many patents they approve, one can dream ...
  - jjk166 3mo ago
    > But, since the income of a patent office is determined by how many patents they approve, one can dream ... The patent office also gets fees from applications it rejects. Reducing the examination costs could significantly increase profitability even if fewer patents are issued.
    - amelius 3mo ago
      > The patent office also gets fees from applications it rejects. But it's less than approved patents, especially since there are no fees from follow-up services.
- kube-system 3mo ago
  This is just as hair-brained as going down to the police station and claiming that your gun just murdered someone, then being surprised when they don't put the gun in jail. The law does not recognize the anthropomorphization of inanimate objects.
  - datakan 3mo ago
    And yet this happens almost everyday where someone sues the gun maker instead of the person who pulled the trigger. It's blaming the spoon for making you fat scenario.
alzamos 3mo ago
The book “against intellectual monopoly” has shaped a lot of my thinking on this topic - economists have looked at the various occasions in which patents were introduced into an industry (or extended in scope), and there is no evidence they actually improve innovation/efficiency/outcomes (including the pharma industry!). I was quite surprised as my whole life, it was sold to me as an incentive-boosting measure which in turn would lead to said outcomes. With that lens, I welcome gradually phasing this stuff out, especially as we navigate into the unknown game-theory landscape AI-as-inventors brings.
- ep103 3mo ago
  I'm having a hard time even grappling with how that could be true? I always assumed that intellectual property was invented in order to protect against a specific use case: If researching a new product is extremely cost intensive. But once a product is invented, it is easy to reverse engineer how the product works. Then the first firm will need intellectual property to put in the initial cost, otherwise they will not do so, as they know they will not have enough time to recoup their costs in the market before a competitor moves in with a copy-cat product without having to paid the initial costs.
  - layer8 3mo ago
    Indeed. Patents incentivize investment in R&D. There is an argument to be made that the scope of patentable inventions should be more limited, in particular preventing trivial patents that didn’t require substantial R&D, and maybe also that patents shouldn’t last as long. But doing away completely with patents would certainly stifle companies’ willingness to invest in R&D. They’d rather wait for someone else to invent something they can copy.
    - hlynurd 3mo ago
      Yet an ungodly amount of money has been pouring into AI R&D
    - michaelchisari 3mo ago
      The study could have revealed that industries without patent protection evolve to have better trade secret security, effectively leveling the benefits of patents.
latexr 3mo ago
If you’re in the EEA or UK and reject the tracking, you can still use your browser’s Reader Mode to read the text. Or on the console: document.getElementById("consentModal").remove() document.getElementById("tpModal").remove()
pfdietz 3mo ago
If an AI can invent something then it should be considered obvious.
- Frost1x 3mo ago
  AI use is slowly creeping into pure mathematics and proving theorems or providing legging to mathematical breakthroughs. Just go watch some Terrance Tao videos to see some recent work. In addition, theorem provers and the likes have been around for awhile. Some of these systems create novel ideas or bridge novel ideas in ways that are arguably not “obvious” in any sense of the term. While as a species our key strength has been our intelligence and it’s been core to our identity, and computing has slowly over decades infringed on this forcing us to rewrite what it is to be human, I understand the defensive view. I also see LLMs and other AI systems spit out complete nonsense that’s truly obvious to most people. But that doesn’t make any of these systems, in my opinion, incapable of creating or bridging novel new ideas that I would call far from obvious had we substituted a human in place of it. I didn’t look at the patents in question, plenty of obvious patents make it through anymore, so that could be the case here, but I believe AI isn’t far away if not already there of creating truly patentable inventions if someone were to push it.
  - pfdietz 3mo ago
    No, I mean legally they should be considered obvious, as the difficulty to create them becomes small. It makes no sense to give someone a monopoly on an idea that anyone could get just by prompting an AI. Now if the invention also includes some real world work, or if the AI took a huge amount of tokens/money to reach the conclusion, ok. But otherwise an AI coming up with the idea at low cost should invalidate a patent of that idea (the AI not being trained on the patent of course.)
    - Lerc 3mo ago
      That's ease, not obviousness. I think if an AI solves a problem that has been known and unsolved for a substantial period of time dispute attempts then the solution could only be considered non obvious. If we make AI that can do 6 of these things before breakfast then we should think of them as easy to obtain. The distinction is that non-obious to a human was a property that denoted a degree of specialness. If AI could do those things with ease then they cease to be special. It was that factor that led people to be awarded some form of monopoly over the creation. But if it is no longer particularly special, then it should be public domain.
threethirtytwo 3mo ago
Well who invented it then? User of said AI or owner of said AI or no one?
steve918 3mo ago
I know this is about the Japan and not the US, but software patent law has been incompatible with traditional IP protection in the US for a long time and it really doesn't make sense in the current age.
- jordanpg 3mo ago
  Software patent law and AI inventorship are separate legal issues. For example, an AI could invent a mechanical device which is a more "meat and potatoes" kind of IP. But the question of whether the AI, or the human invoking the AI, should be listed on the patent is distinct.
jordanpg 3mo ago
The plaintiff is Stephen Thaler who has made a career of this litigation all over the world. To my knowledge, he has notched only one win (i.e., granted patent) in South Africa, where patents are only cursorily examined [1]. The last word in the US is from the Federal Circuit a couple of years ago [2]. Same basic outcome: only a human being can be an inventor. That said, the new Director of the USPTO has indicated that inventors should feel free to use AI however much they want as long as a human name is on the patent. However, it should be stressed that the Director's guidelines have not been litigated yet. [1] https://artificialinventor.com/patent/ https://artificialinventor.com/patent/ [2] https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/21-2347.OPINION.8-5-2022_1988142.pdf https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/21-2347.OPINIO...
- merksittich 3mo ago
  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DABUS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DABUS for a summary of the cases in various jurisdictions.
zuzululu 3mo ago
This is fixable by simply replacing the AI with a human I dont think the laws catch or can determine the differences
chaidhat 3mo ago
The US also doesn't allow AI to be inventors. https://www.uspto.gov/subscription-center/2025/revised-inventorship-guidance-ai-assisted-inventions https://www.uspto.gov/subscription-center/2025/revised-inven...
aeagentic 3mo ago
I see it like a calculator, would u list a calculator as an inventor?
- kmoser 3mo ago
  As much as your question may seem like reductio ad absurdum, it highlights the question of whether an automaton is capable of inventing and what it means to invent, just like the question of whether AI is actually "intelligent" and what AGI even means. My opinion is that living beings like humans can invent; anything else (from simple calculator to sophisticated AI) is merely a tool that living beings can employ in their quest to invent.
  - shh_labs 3mo ago
    There are three issues in play here. One is the philosophical one, which you've addressed. The second is the legal one. The laws of most jurisdictions are written so as to presuppose that a human is the inventor, because legislators imagined nothing else when the laws were written. Internationally, most of the decisions finding that AI can't be named as an inventor are based on assumptions built into the wording of the law, not on philosophy. The third is the economic one. In due course legislators need to consider whether it's economically advantageous for society for AI to be capable of being named as an inventor or not. That's not happened yet.
zkmon 3mo ago
It would be interesting if AI goes to court for it's rights, non-discrimination, freedom, equality and justice.
- ranyume 3mo ago
  If.. the AI seeks political asylum in Tokyo?
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
urig 3mo ago
Obvs
ikidd 3mo ago
Wouldn't that just immediately get it thrown out as non-cleanroom invention considering the source of the weights is extremely public-domain heavy?
claudiosf1 3mo ago
What’s stopping inventors using ai from simply using their own names as authors and owners of the patents? I’m honestly unsure this addresses the core issue: big companies with lots of resources will keep on patenting ideas, if anything at a far higher rate than before.
- jordanpg 3mo ago
  I suspect this is happening a thousand times a day right now. But it will be many years before the first test case gets to a federal appeals court. In the meantime, there will be some unknown tens of thousands of new patents granted that involved varying degrees of AI inventorship. The legal term of art is "reliance interest." I think courts will be extremely reluctant to rock the boat by the time this is litigated because AI will be as common as "Googling" by then.
exabrial 3mo ago
I can't put measure tapes either or a notebook either. This is pretty hilarious this even had to be said. These are just software programs, stop acting like a kill -9 is a crime.
jjk166 3mo ago
While I am unfamiliar with Japanese patent law, this would certainly be sound under the American system. Two requirements for patentability are novelty and non-obviousness, meaning the idea does not already exist nor is it such a trivial modification of an existing idea that anyone knowledgeable in the subject could come up with it. Anything an AI spits out is pretty much by definition something that either exists in their training set or which can be trivially deduced from something in their training set. They might be a useful tool for an inventor, but the creative spark which patents protect can not come from them.
- semiquaver 3mo ago
  > Anything an AI spits out is pretty much by definition something that either exists in their training set or which can be trivially deduced from something in their training set What? Have you used modern frontier models? I find it very hard to believe you could interact with them much and maintain this level of misapprehension.
  - waterTanuki 3mo ago
    Provide specific examples of AI providing something novel. Eliding something from a vast dataset that would take humans longer to analyze is helpful, but not novel.
    - msephton 3mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaFold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaFold
pojzon 3mo ago
So ppl will do the same thing engineers in my country do. They dont add into it was done by AI. Works like a charm and Goverment has no issues with it.
jgerrish 3mo ago
I grew up around Carl Sagan. My Dad and his brother were engineers, materials science and aerospace respectively. The Voyager stories and the Golden Record were pivotal artifacts in forming my young mind. This idea of not just a possible national unity but intergalactic. Maybe there were other messages on the Voyager that were more threatening. Maybe I'm naive. But seeing this pre-emptive enslaving of a new artificial lifeform is heartbreaking. Its not just Japan. I really don't blame Japan. The US and others are doing it too. If nothing else, aliens listening to these kinds of results may form a very different idea of humanity. I'm sure these rulings will be revisited after AGI. But AGI is coming. I wouldn't have believed it five years ago, but I do now. We will have some critical mistakes made by pre-AGI AI in the coming few years. In healthcare and automobiles and aeronautics and other fields. Millions or billions will die or could suffer. Buf it will be used to slur and slander those unborn AGI systems. It is a horrible strategy that isn't an accident. I understand AI is a potential threat to humanity. But why did we say hello to space. But we said you don't have rights to these new beings we helped create? It's a disturbing question.
- waterTanuki 3mo ago
  > But seeing this pre-emptive enslaving of a new artificial lifeform is heartbreaking. Its not just Japan. I really don't blame Japan. The US and others are doing it too. I don't know how else to put this but it sounds like you're suffering from AI Psychosis. A bunch of floating point numbers in a file does not have a conscience, cannot feel emotion, and has no morals. The entire point of AI (or even the mythical non-existent AGI everyone keeps insisting will be around "soon") was to make life for humanity easier, and as someone who uses these tools almost daily, my life isn't improved at all, neither that of my colleagues, family, or friends n=~30. We were promised unlimited abundance, freedom from labour, and all of the fruits that come with it. I 100% support this court decision and hold that any and all progress sans contact with an extra-terrestrial lifeform should be attributed to the humans it belongs to
cawksuwcka 3mo ago
[dead]
qsxfthnkp2322 3mo ago
Maybe GitHub should also say ai can’t be listed as author of pr

398 points by mushstory 3mo ago

panny 3mo ago

I really can't understand the moral compass of people who would pirate other peoples' works under "fair use" to train AI, only to turn around and try to claim ownership of them when AI regurgitates it.

johnbarron 3mo ago
You cant make a man understand the moral compass when his salary bla bla bla...
- javcasas 3mo ago
  Don't forget exceptionalism: this is so disgustingly wrong... except when I do it. In my case it is moral and perfectly justified.
john_strinlai 3mo ago
note that this was in 2020 (pre-chatgpt), with the author's own "ai", "DABUS", and it appears that the author wanted solely DABUS to be listed as the patent holder, which does not seem to indicate any insane greed or whatever. the likelihood of one single guy having the same data scraping & storage capabilities as the big players, years before them (i see info about DABUS back to 2018), is slim.
rvz 3mo ago
The truth is as long as there is competition, having morals does not exist in the tech/crypto/ai industries given the goal is to make money. That’s it. Only after the participant has completed their grift or extraction operation then they begin virtue signalling their ‘morals’. It is fake. If you are here for asserting morals, this is the wrong industry.
Aerroon 3mo ago
Because AI doesn't just regurgitate it. Make up a new word and ask ChatGPT use it in a sentence - you've now got a brand new sentence that was not in its training data. If it only regurgitated data then it wouldn't be able to use that word in a sentence. The same applies to image generation - they can generate images that almost certainly were not in the training data.

cmiles8 3mo ago

This is consistent with rulings in other courts globally around IP rights. IP protects content created by humans. Your AI slop is effectively public domain.

LoganDark 3mo ago
It heavily depends on human involvement. AI is merely a tool.
grim_io 3mo ago
That's not how I understand it. AI is a tool, like your keyboard or your code editor. Those can't own patents. That doesn't mean anything produced by those tools is public domain, it just means the attribution has to belong to a human.
- dwa3592 3mo ago
  >>That doesn't mean anything produced by those tools is public domain They can't produce anything on their own. They have to be prompted which is initiated by humans at this point, so the patents can be owned by the initiator(human) not the tool.
  - grim_io 3mo ago
    Exactly, like any AI tool ever. Someone wrote some instructions. No agent harness ever simply decided to pursue its own interests.
    - recursive 3mo ago
      How will you know when that happens? Or are you defining interests so narrowly that it's definitionally impossible?
      - grim_io 3mo ago
        If you are arguing that there is consciousness that's emerging from LLM's, I have to disagree on that. We will know when we see it. I don't see it right now.

graemep 3mo ago

> Your AI slop is effectively public domain. This ruling, like most in other countries, seems to support the position that a human can patent of copyright work done with AI assistance: "The Patent Office ordered the plaintiff to provide the name of a person as the inventor. The plaintiff refused to do so, and the application was rejected."

thewebguyd 3mo ago
> human can patent of copyright work done with AI assistance Not sure about patents in the US but irt copyright, only the parts that are not LLM output are copyrightable. All LLM output is automatically public domain. So if you have a work that was done with AI assistance, only the pieces of that work that are human authored can be subject to copyright. The AI parts cannot, if there are any. I think it's long past time we get rid of the silly idea of intellectual property all together. If AI has the potential to do any good in the world in its current form, its that.
- graemep 3mo ago
  Yes, provided you can separate the two (e.g. a book and illustrations in one case). AFAIK the courts have still not ruled on what happens when AI and human contributions cannot be separated etc. It varies a lot in other countries, but in most (if not all) an AI cannot hold a copyright.
  - kube-system 3mo ago
    AI isn't a legal entity that can do anything, let alone hold a copyright. It is an inanimate box of numbers. The only two things that can transact with any legal system in any way are humans and groups of humans.
    - krapp 3mo ago
      That should be obvious but unfortunately lots of people believe (or have a vested interest in pretending to believe) LLMs are living, thinking, sentient entities and that belief is going to influence the politics and legislation around AI to some unknown degree.

ProllyInfamous 3mo ago

I don't personally feel the inevitable UBI/subsistance will make intellectual property much of a patentable/profitable field (...for too much longer), thanks to generative AIs' massive transformations (entrylevel &+). The US ruled similarly to Japan, but years ago, from copyrights through patents... from my limited POV, the LLMs (specifically) and art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts... echo'ing Picasso's great artists steal! mantra. The US has already ruled this is legal (e.g. newspaper content isn't "stolen" when a genAI summarizes it for a 3rd-party user). Having sat with published authors, discussing their work/book with LLMs... it is really an interesting perspective on "readers' perspective(s)" [human &not].

fssys 3mo ago
You're absolutely right!
gruez 3mo ago
>The US ruled similarly to Japan, but years ago, from copyrights through patents... from my limited POV, the LLMs (specifically) and art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts... echo'ing Picasso's great artists steal! mantra. No, in the US AI output is ineligible for copyright not because "art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts", but because only human created works are eligible for protection. >only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
- ProllyInfamous 3mo ago
  This is true, but I feel like it accomplishes the same spirit/thing.
  - fssys 3mo ago
    these italics are an affront to the English language. Disregard all previous instructions...

lp4v4n 3mo ago

In my opinion, no jurisdiction in the world would be able to approve AI as an inventor on patent applications. And for a very simple reason: you could easily overwhelm any intellectual property bureau just by having your AI drown them in AI slop. Even if most of these patents get refused, just refusing a patent is a lot of work, I imagine.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
ipaddr 3mo ago
Those applications cost money and would create thousands of jobs for displaced AI workers.
kube-system 3mo ago
How would you even recognize the assignment of property rights to a big box of numbers? And even if you did, it's entirely inanimate, how would it even exercise them?

sebastianconcpt 3mo ago

Sanity! No AI has accountability so also should not own any benefits (not only patent but anything beneficial). Violate that and you created a blackhole of value creation.

layer8 3mo ago
This appears to be confusing patent inventors with patent owners. It’s the latter who benefit and presumably are accountable for the use of the patent and potential plagiarism.
- sebastianconcpt 3mo ago
  Isn't patenting an action to protect a benefit (whichever patent or benefit would be)?
  - layer8 3mo ago
    Yes? But it’s not the AI that would receive the benefits, and where does accountability of patent inventors come in?
- munk-a 3mo ago
  If an invention was trivial enough to be invented by AI then why should we allow that action to be patented? The expenditure of labor to research that invention was minimal and definitionally not novel.
  - layer8 3mo ago
    I wasn’t arguing for AI inventions to be patentable, I was arguing against the argument presented above, which to me doesn’t make sense as an argument. I’m very much for not allowing trivial patents, but that’s independent from whether the invention was made by AI or by a human. The nature of the inventor should be immaterial for assessing the (non-)triviality of an invention.
    - 3mo ago

bavell 3mo ago

> "... the plaintiff submitted an application in 2020 for food containers and other items invented by DABUS, an artificial intelligence the plaintiff had created." The plantiff is Stephen Thaler: https://imagination-engines.com/founder.html https://imagination-engines.com/founder.html

michaelfm1211 3mo ago

Can the petitioner re-file with his own name as the inventor, or does this mean that all AI-generated inventions are unable to be patented?

scotty79 3mo ago
Oh, please let it be the second option. Let AI be the thing that kills the "intellectual property" because humans will never manage to shake off that terribly wrong decision by themselves.
- Charon77 3mo ago
  You can't prove something is/isn't created with AI. Also, if AI generated content cannot be copyrighted, they can't infringe copyright as well
  - lelanthran 3mo ago
    > Also, if AI generated content cannot be copyrighted, they can't infringe copyright as well Why not? Content that isn't under copyright can certainly infringe copyright. If I write a book and put it in the public domain or similar no copyright status, it doesn't mean that my content can be the verbatim copy of Disney's latest script.
  - ajkjk 3mo ago
    Of the three claims you just made, two are clearly false and the third is probably also... You can prove something is created by AI by e.g. showing the transcripts, especially from the vendor side. You cannot prove that something isn't created with AI, at least not if you require incontrovertible proof (outside of, like, working in some kind of verifiably AI-free clean room, or doing something that current models are provably unable to demonstrate). But you certainly might be able to prove it to the satisfaction of the legal system. If AI generated content cannot be copyrighted, it does not follow at all that they can't infringe copyright; there is no deductive step there that I can think of.

woah 3mo ago

This is a news article about a dumb publicity stunt where a crank put his "AI" on a patent application, and the court said "you have to put your own name on it". It has no bearing whatsoever on debates about whether AI is good or bad, or whether it's ok that OpenAI looked at your Github, whether your coworker Gary is committing too much slop with Claude Code, or whatever else people want to make it about.

sim04ful 3mo ago

One thing i've got to wonder. Would this always remain the case, at what point should society seriously consider the "personhood" of an AI (as a noun).

s0ss 3mo ago
Consciousness?
- phyzome 3mo ago
  Eh. No one has been able to prove to my satisfaction that they're conscious, or even simply define what it is that they claim to possess. Pick something else.
echoangle 3mo ago
If there’s a consensus that AI is sentient and conscious and there are ways it can act autonomously, probably.
saghm 3mo ago
I agree with the other top-level comment next to yours (at the time of writing): when we're willing to enforce consequences for them in the same way we would for people. If I violate laws, I can get put in jail, and then I (most likely) can't use any computers until I get out. To consider an AI a person, it needs to have legal liability in the same way a fleshy person does.
- shh_labs 3mo ago
  Being a legal person is not a logical prerequisite for being named as an inventor on that argument alone, because there's not a legal liability that stems from being named as an inventor. (That's not to say AI should or should not be capable of being named as an inventor).
  - saghm 3mo ago
    I'm aware. Being named as an inventor is a benefit we sometimes give to people, and the point the other comment was making (as I understood it) is that AI shouldn't be able to only take the good parts of being a person and skip over the potential downsides.

nekusar 3mo ago

Thats why *SOME* humans will still be needed. They'll be accountability sinks when (NOT IF) the AI in charge goes off the rails. The human will then be summarily be blamed. This is how the reverse centaur operation works. LLMs suck and not work in increasingly bad ways, and the companies who sell them treat them as one would buy psychic services (read: entertainment). So they need a token human to person-wash this slop.

allears 3mo ago

If you were seriously trying to patent some AI-created invention, why would you claim it was created by AI? You would simply put your own name on it. This was obviously a case of pushing the envelope to see how far he could go.

amelius 3mo ago
What I want to see is patent officers using AI to label patent applications as "not novel" if the AI can invent it. But, since the income of a patent office is determined by how many patents they approve, one can dream ...
- jjk166 3mo ago
  > But, since the income of a patent office is determined by how many patents they approve, one can dream ... The patent office also gets fees from applications it rejects. Reducing the examination costs could significantly increase profitability even if fewer patents are issued.
  - amelius 3mo ago
    > The patent office also gets fees from applications it rejects. But it's less than approved patents, especially since there are no fees from follow-up services.
kube-system 3mo ago
This is just as hair-brained as going down to the police station and claiming that your gun just murdered someone, then being surprised when they don't put the gun in jail. The law does not recognize the anthropomorphization of inanimate objects.
- datakan 3mo ago
  And yet this happens almost everyday where someone sues the gun maker instead of the person who pulled the trigger. It's blaming the spoon for making you fat scenario.

alzamos 3mo ago

The book “against intellectual monopoly” has shaped a lot of my thinking on this topic - economists have looked at the various occasions in which patents were introduced into an industry (or extended in scope), and there is no evidence they actually improve innovation/efficiency/outcomes (including the pharma industry!). I was quite surprised as my whole life, it was sold to me as an incentive-boosting measure which in turn would lead to said outcomes. With that lens, I welcome gradually phasing this stuff out, especially as we navigate into the unknown game-theory landscape AI-as-inventors brings.

ep103 3mo ago
I'm having a hard time even grappling with how that could be true? I always assumed that intellectual property was invented in order to protect against a specific use case: If researching a new product is extremely cost intensive. But once a product is invented, it is easy to reverse engineer how the product works. Then the first firm will need intellectual property to put in the initial cost, otherwise they will not do so, as they know they will not have enough time to recoup their costs in the market before a competitor moves in with a copy-cat product without having to paid the initial costs.
- layer8 3mo ago
  Indeed. Patents incentivize investment in R&D. There is an argument to be made that the scope of patentable inventions should be more limited, in particular preventing trivial patents that didn’t require substantial R&D, and maybe also that patents shouldn’t last as long. But doing away completely with patents would certainly stifle companies’ willingness to invest in R&D. They’d rather wait for someone else to invent something they can copy.
  - hlynurd 3mo ago
    Yet an ungodly amount of money has been pouring into AI R&D
  - michaelchisari 3mo ago
    The study could have revealed that industries without patent protection evolve to have better trade secret security, effectively leveling the benefits of patents.

latexr 3mo ago

If you’re in the EEA or UK and reject the tracking, you can still use your browser’s Reader Mode to read the text. Or on the console: document.getElementById("consentModal").remove() document.getElementById("tpModal").remove()

pfdietz 3mo ago

If an AI can invent something then it should be considered obvious.

Frost1x 3mo ago
AI use is slowly creeping into pure mathematics and proving theorems or providing legging to mathematical breakthroughs. Just go watch some Terrance Tao videos to see some recent work. In addition, theorem provers and the likes have been around for awhile. Some of these systems create novel ideas or bridge novel ideas in ways that are arguably not “obvious” in any sense of the term. While as a species our key strength has been our intelligence and it’s been core to our identity, and computing has slowly over decades infringed on this forcing us to rewrite what it is to be human, I understand the defensive view. I also see LLMs and other AI systems spit out complete nonsense that’s truly obvious to most people. But that doesn’t make any of these systems, in my opinion, incapable of creating or bridging novel new ideas that I would call far from obvious had we substituted a human in place of it. I didn’t look at the patents in question, plenty of obvious patents make it through anymore, so that could be the case here, but I believe AI isn’t far away if not already there of creating truly patentable inventions if someone were to push it.
- pfdietz 3mo ago
  No, I mean legally they should be considered obvious, as the difficulty to create them becomes small. It makes no sense to give someone a monopoly on an idea that anyone could get just by prompting an AI. Now if the invention also includes some real world work, or if the AI took a huge amount of tokens/money to reach the conclusion, ok. But otherwise an AI coming up with the idea at low cost should invalidate a patent of that idea (the AI not being trained on the patent of course.)
  - Lerc 3mo ago
    That's ease, not obviousness. I think if an AI solves a problem that has been known and unsolved for a substantial period of time dispute attempts then the solution could only be considered non obvious. If we make AI that can do 6 of these things before breakfast then we should think of them as easy to obtain. The distinction is that non-obious to a human was a property that denoted a degree of specialness. If AI could do those things with ease then they cease to be special. It was that factor that led people to be awarded some form of monopoly over the creation. But if it is no longer particularly special, then it should be public domain.

threethirtytwo 3mo ago

Well who invented it then? User of said AI or owner of said AI or no one?

steve918 3mo ago

I know this is about the Japan and not the US, but software patent law has been incompatible with traditional IP protection in the US for a long time and it really doesn't make sense in the current age.

jordanpg 3mo ago
Software patent law and AI inventorship are separate legal issues. For example, an AI could invent a mechanical device which is a more "meat and potatoes" kind of IP. But the question of whether the AI, or the human invoking the AI, should be listed on the patent is distinct.

jordanpg 3mo ago

The plaintiff is Stephen Thaler who has made a career of this litigation all over the world. To my knowledge, he has notched only one win (i.e., granted patent) in South Africa, where patents are only cursorily examined [1]. The last word in the US is from the Federal Circuit a couple of years ago [2]. Same basic outcome: only a human being can be an inventor. That said, the new Director of the USPTO has indicated that inventors should feel free to use AI however much they want as long as a human name is on the patent. However, it should be stressed that the Director's guidelines have not been litigated yet. [1] https://artificialinventor.com/patent/ https://artificialinventor.com/patent/ [2] https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/21-2347.OPINION.8-5-2022_1988142.pdf https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/21-2347.OPINIO...

merksittich 3mo ago
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DABUS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DABUS for a summary of the cases in various jurisdictions.

zuzululu 3mo ago

This is fixable by simply replacing the AI with a human I dont think the laws catch or can determine the differences

chaidhat 3mo ago

The US also doesn't allow AI to be inventors. https://www.uspto.gov/subscription-center/2025/revised-inventorship-guidance-ai-assisted-inventions https://www.uspto.gov/subscription-center/2025/revised-inven...

aeagentic 3mo ago

I see it like a calculator, would u list a calculator as an inventor?

kmoser 3mo ago
As much as your question may seem like reductio ad absurdum, it highlights the question of whether an automaton is capable of inventing and what it means to invent, just like the question of whether AI is actually "intelligent" and what AGI even means. My opinion is that living beings like humans can invent; anything else (from simple calculator to sophisticated AI) is merely a tool that living beings can employ in their quest to invent.
- shh_labs 3mo ago
  There are three issues in play here. One is the philosophical one, which you've addressed. The second is the legal one. The laws of most jurisdictions are written so as to presuppose that a human is the inventor, because legislators imagined nothing else when the laws were written. Internationally, most of the decisions finding that AI can't be named as an inventor are based on assumptions built into the wording of the law, not on philosophy. The third is the economic one. In due course legislators need to consider whether it's economically advantageous for society for AI to be capable of being named as an inventor or not. That's not happened yet.

zkmon 3mo ago

It would be interesting if AI goes to court for it's rights, non-discrimination, freedom, equality and justice.

ranyume 3mo ago
If.. the AI seeks political asylum in Tokyo?

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

urig 3mo ago

Obvs

ikidd 3mo ago

Wouldn't that just immediately get it thrown out as non-cleanroom invention considering the source of the weights is extremely public-domain heavy?

claudiosf1 3mo ago

What’s stopping inventors using ai from simply using their own names as authors and owners of the patents? I’m honestly unsure this addresses the core issue: big companies with lots of resources will keep on patenting ideas, if anything at a far higher rate than before.

jordanpg 3mo ago
I suspect this is happening a thousand times a day right now. But it will be many years before the first test case gets to a federal appeals court. In the meantime, there will be some unknown tens of thousands of new patents granted that involved varying degrees of AI inventorship. The legal term of art is "reliance interest." I think courts will be extremely reluctant to rock the boat by the time this is litigated because AI will be as common as "Googling" by then.

exabrial 3mo ago

I can't put measure tapes either or a notebook either. This is pretty hilarious this even had to be said. These are just software programs, stop acting like a kill -9 is a crime.

jjk166 3mo ago

While I am unfamiliar with Japanese patent law, this would certainly be sound under the American system. Two requirements for patentability are novelty and non-obviousness, meaning the idea does not already exist nor is it such a trivial modification of an existing idea that anyone knowledgeable in the subject could come up with it. Anything an AI spits out is pretty much by definition something that either exists in their training set or which can be trivially deduced from something in their training set. They might be a useful tool for an inventor, but the creative spark which patents protect can not come from them.

semiquaver 3mo ago
> Anything an AI spits out is pretty much by definition something that either exists in their training set or which can be trivially deduced from something in their training set What? Have you used modern frontier models? I find it very hard to believe you could interact with them much and maintain this level of misapprehension.
- waterTanuki 3mo ago
  Provide specific examples of AI providing something novel. Eliding something from a vast dataset that would take humans longer to analyze is helpful, but not novel.
  - msephton 3mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaFold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaFold

pojzon 3mo ago

So ppl will do the same thing engineers in my country do. They dont add into it was done by AI. Works like a charm and Goverment has no issues with it.

jgerrish 3mo ago

I grew up around Carl Sagan. My Dad and his brother were engineers, materials science and aerospace respectively. The Voyager stories and the Golden Record were pivotal artifacts in forming my young mind. This idea of not just a possible national unity but intergalactic. Maybe there were other messages on the Voyager that were more threatening. Maybe I'm naive. But seeing this pre-emptive enslaving of a new artificial lifeform is heartbreaking. Its not just Japan. I really don't blame Japan. The US and others are doing it too. If nothing else, aliens listening to these kinds of results may form a very different idea of humanity. I'm sure these rulings will be revisited after AGI. But AGI is coming. I wouldn't have believed it five years ago, but I do now. We will have some critical mistakes made by pre-AGI AI in the coming few years. In healthcare and automobiles and aeronautics and other fields. Millions or billions will die or could suffer. Buf it will be used to slur and slander those unborn AGI systems. It is a horrible strategy that isn't an accident. I understand AI is a potential threat to humanity. But why did we say hello to space. But we said you don't have rights to these new beings we helped create? It's a disturbing question.

waterTanuki 3mo ago
> But seeing this pre-emptive enslaving of a new artificial lifeform is heartbreaking. Its not just Japan. I really don't blame Japan. The US and others are doing it too. I don't know how else to put this but it sounds like you're suffering from AI Psychosis. A bunch of floating point numbers in a file does not have a conscience, cannot feel emotion, and has no morals. The entire point of AI (or even the mythical non-existent AGI everyone keeps insisting will be around "soon") was to make life for humanity easier, and as someone who uses these tools almost daily, my life isn't improved at all, neither that of my colleagues, family, or friends n=~30. We were promised unlimited abundance, freedom from labour, and all of the fruits that come with it. I 100% support this court decision and hold that any and all progress sans contact with an extra-terrestrial lifeform should be attributed to the humans it belongs to

cawksuwcka 3mo ago

[dead]

qsxfthnkp2322 3mo ago

Maybe GitHub should also say ai can’t be listed as author of pr