EU Patent Office rejects two patent applications in which AI was designated as the inventor; this is the right decision that all patent offices should emulate
We've written a bunch about why AI generated artwork should not (and need not) have any copyright at all.
Context & Ripple Effects
Techdirt has long argued that purely machine-made output should carry no exclusive rights at all, and the EU Patent Office's rejection of two applications naming an AI as inventor extends that logic from copyright into patents. The decision lands as the first move in what became a coordinated global pattern: a [[a:970310|US federal judge later ruled an AI cannot be listed as an inventor because US law requires an individual to take the inventor's oath]], and the [[a:847510|UK Supreme Court ultimately denied a US computer scientist's bid for two patents on his AI's creations]].
First-order effects
- Applicants who file with an AI designated as inventor now face outright rejection at the EPO, forcing them to name a human — typically whoever conceived the system or directed its use — to keep any claim alive.
Second-order effects
- Companies developing invention-generating systems must restructure their patent strategy around human attribution, since the same human-inventor requirement has been upheld by US courts and the UK Supreme Court rather than being an EU quirk.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, inventorship law settles on a durable rule — machines are tools, not authors of record — which the USPTO's later guidelines codifying generative AI as an assistive tool already point toward, leaving open only how much human direction suffices.
The trend: Patent and copyright authorities across the EU, US, and UK are converging on human authorship and inventorship as a non-negotiable legal requirement for AI-generated work.