AI and patentability?

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) released a guidance update on subject matter eligibility to “address innovation in critical and emerging technologies (ET), especially artificial intelligence (AI)”.  This update provides insights on subject matter eligibility analysis, and in particular on whether a claim integrates an abstract idea into a practical application. The guidance includes three new hypothetical examples:

• relating to detecting anomalies using an artificial neural network; 
• relating to speech separation using a deep neural network; and
• relating to using a machine learning model to assist with fibrosis treatment. 

Early this year, the European Patent Office (EPO) issued important updates to the EPO’s practice for examining inventions in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

For further information on this update, check out this article, by Philip Cupitt, Partner at Marks & Clerk.

Stay tuned for Marks & Clerk's annual AI report, which features insights on trends in AI patent applications, that will be published later this year.

Picture from Herman Hollerith's US Patent on apparatus for compiling statistics.