UK Supreme Court hears DABUS appeal

Stephen Thaler’s legal campaign returns to the limelight following rejection by several other jurisdictions | AI machine ‘DABUS’ tests invention theory under established patent law | Five Justices hear arguments on the ‘Absence of traditional human inventor’.

The question of whether an artificial intelligence (AI) robot can be a named inventor was heard today in the UK Supreme Court, following an appeal brought by physicist and inventor Stephen Thaler.

A bench of five Justices heard arguments from Thaler’s legal team, including professor Ryan Abbott, with the UK’s comptroller-general of patents, designs and trade marks, Adam Williams, responding.

The one-day hearing, which was live-streamed from the court, is the latest in Thaler’s ongoing legal campaign.

Thaler, who masterminded the AI machine known as DABUS, has already had patent applications rejected by the UK, the US, the European Patent Office, and Australia.

South Africa is so far the only jurisdiction to have granted the patents, in July 2021—the first patent office in the world to grant a patent listing an AI rather than a person as the inventor. However, South Africa does not examine patent applications in a substantive way.

Thaler's application was rejected by the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) in 2019, a decision which was upheld by the England and Wales High Court the following year.

The English Court of Appeal dismissed his case in September 2021, but cautioned against the UKIPO’s resistance to the concept of AI ownership proposed by the case.

While Thaler had stated that his right to be granted a patent was on the basis of his ownership of DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience), he specifically did not want to name himself as the inventor.