Australian court rules AI can be considered an inventor on patent filings, days after South Africa granted a patent in which AI was designated as the inventor
Simon Sharwood / The Register :
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second crack in a wall that had been solid: after the EU Patent Office rejected two applications naming AI as inventor in early 2020 — a move Techdirt urged all offices to emulate — South Africa granted a patent days ago listing an AI as the inventor, and now an Australian court has held that an AI can be considered an inventor on filings.
The significance is jurisdictional arbitrage: the same application strategy can be refused in Brussels and accepted in Pretoria and Canberra. The counterweight arrived quickly — weeks later a [[a:970310|US federal judge ruled AI cannot be listed as an inventor because US law requires an individual to take the inventor's oath]], and two years on the UK Supreme Court likewise denied an AI-named patent bid, leaving Australia and South Africa as outliers.
First-order effects
- Applicants behind AI-generated inventions gain two working filing venues: South Africa's granted patent and an Australian legal position that accepts an AI as inventor, letting them keep those claims alive where other offices refuse them.
- Patent offices and courts that have rejected AI inventorship — the EU Patent Office, and shortly the US federal judiciary — face direct pressure from applicants pointing to Australia and South Africa as proof the alternative is administrable.
Second-order effects
- Multinational filers begin forum-shopping, designating an AI as inventor only in permissive jurisdictions while restructuring the same filings around human inventors elsewhere — splitting one invention's patent family across inconsistent legal theories.
- Offices holding the human-inventor line must articulate why their statutory definitions differ, turning what looked like settled doctrine into a live comparative-law argument that applicants will litigate repeatedly.
Third-order effects
- If the outlier pattern holds, the industry heads toward fragmented global protection for AI-generated inventions — enforceable in some territories, void in others — raising the odds that treaty-level harmonization or explicit legislative fixes become the only way to resolve who owns machine-made inventions.
The trend: Jurisdictions are splitting on whether an AI can be a patent inventor, pushing applicants toward permissive offices like Australia and South Africa while the US, UK and EU hold the line.