Federal Circuit rules AI cannot be a patent inventor

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled in Thaler v. Vidal that an artificial intelligence system cannot be named as the inventor on a US patent. Computer scientist Stephen Thaler had filed two patent applications in 2019 naming DABUS — a system he built and separately holds a patent on — as the sole inventor of the claimed devices, with Thaler listed as the applications’ owner by virtue of owning the machine rather than as an author of the inventions himself.

The Patent and Trademark Office had rejected both applications for lacking a valid inventor, and Thaler sued to overturn that decision. The court’s reasoning turned on statutory text: the Patent Act defines an “inventor” as the “individual or, if a joint invention, the individuals collectively” who invented the claimed subject matter. The Federal Circuit held that although the statute does not define “individual,” the term’s ordinary meaning is a natural person, and that Congress would have had to say so explicitly to extend inventorship to a machine. The panel treated the question as one of statutory interpretation rather than a judgment about whether DABUS was in fact capable of invention.

The ruling left open, and did not need to resolve, how much human involvement in an AI-assisted invention is sufficient for a human collaborator to qualify as the legal inventor — a live question given that AI tools were by then commonly used somewhere in the research process behind many conventional patent applications. The US Supreme Court denied Thaler’s petition for review the following April, leaving the Federal Circuit’s ruling as the governing US precedent, and Thaler’s parallel campaign to have DABUS recognised as an author produced a similar result in copyright litigation the following year.