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

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• Hacker News
• > "... 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

  by bavell
• 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).
  by sim04ful
• Consciousness?
  by s0ss
• If there’s a consensus that AI is sentient and conscious and there are ways it can act autonomously, probably.
  by echoangle
• Corporate personhood has already been disastrous enough. We don't need to compound it with AI personhood on top.
  by Mountain_Skies
• Specifically for patent law, the distinction should be whether the entity is capable of genuine innovation, ie that it's not simply pulling existing information from its training set and passing things through some RNGs. It's not a matter of how advanced the AI is, it's a matter of the architecture.
  by jjk166
• 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.
  by saghm
• 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.

  by exabrial
• 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()

  by latexr
• The US also doesn't allow AI to be inventors. https://www.uspto.gov/subscription-center/2025/revised-inven...
  by chaidhat
• 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].

  by ProllyInfamous
• You're absolutely right!
  by fssys
• > from my limited POV, the LLMs (specifically) and art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts

  Formally speaking, it's not the case, though this is commonly misunderstood. Statistical models are definitionally ampliative, otherwise they wouldn't be statistical. One can argue about it until they're blue in the face, but it almost always comes down to a misunderstanding of what the models are, what the mathematics behind them is a description of, and what the underlying logical structures represent.

  The thing is that the position and objection to these models isn't actually a substantial, reasoned position where the words have a direct meaning. Though it's dressed up like reason, it's not the point. It's a kind of metaphor. This actually does reflect the nature of intellectual property law. The legal framework is knowingly illogical at an object-level, because the end its seeking is completely divorced from the means. It has to be, because the idea of intellectual property is absolutely unjustifiable in-and-of-itself. It's just a useful legal fiction to make sure people are getting paid by commoditizing ideation. That's not a bad thing, it just means you have to be mindful that bottom-up reason will lead you astray when dealing with it.

  by ux266478
• >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_disput...

  by gruez
• 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.
  by claudiosf1
• 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.
  by jordanpg
• 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/

  [2] https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/21-2347.OPINIO...

  by jordanpg
• See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DABUS for a summary of the cases in various jurisdictions.
  by merksittich
• 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?
  by michaelfm1211
• 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.
  by scotty79
• Like many things, these differ by jurisdictions.

  I believe in many countries, the standard for a wide range of IP is that if something is largely produced by AI systems, it can not be patented / copyrighted / trademarked. It seems that "a significant" contribution must have been done by humans, that's the word you'll see again and again.

  But I am not sure how one could prove that something is produced mostly by AI, or mostly by human. Right now anyone could use AI models to do most of the work, and just say or make up documentation that it is (major) human work.

  by TrackerFF
• >"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."

  implies that if he provided his name as the inventor, the application may not have been rejected.

  by john_strinlai
• Broadly speaking, IP law generally exists to protect the rights of humans. The law doesn't generally recognize that inanimate objects have rights.

  The idea that an AI could have some sort of property rights is a nonstarter, legally speaking. It's just as invalid of a legal idea as claiming that a tree could have a patent on the shape of its leaf.

  So when people go to the patent office and say "I didn't make this! an AI invented this", the obvious response from the patent office is "cool, well only humans get rights, and if you didn't make it, you can't get a patent on it, so too bad". This isn't a judgement of AI.

  Now, a lot of people come to presume that this means that anything that AI touches is not subject to any IP rights -- but that's not what this means at all. Humans are allowed to use tools to create things that they have IP rights to. Your typewriter itself can't hold a copyright to a book, but if you use a typewriter, you can still hold the copyright to the book.

  Ultimately, whether or not the use of AI is disqualifying to a human inventor doesn't really have anything to do with AI -- it all hinges on whether or not the human meets the requirements of holding the patent.

  by kube-system
• 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.
  by allears
• 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 ...

  by amelius
• 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.

  by kube-system
• 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.
  by sebastianconcpt
• >No AI has accountability so also should not own any benefits

  That doesn't follow at all. A baby doesn't have accountability, but has benefits.

  I'm all for accountability being required for important descion making. I too wouldn't let babies make similar descisions.

  This non sequitur just makes it sound like you're throwing around talking points and getting them mixed up.

  by Lerc
• 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.
  by layer8
• 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.

  by alzamos