The UK Supreme Court has made a landmark ruling that a computer scientist cannot register patents on inventions created by his artificial intelligence system.

The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) had previously denied Stephen Thaler two patents for inventions which were designed by his “creativity machine” dubbed DABUS. The IPO at the time ruled that a patent’s inventor must be a human or a company and not a machine.

The computer scientist appealed to the UK Supreme Court, however the highest legal body in the country backed the original ruling, as "an inventor must be a natural person" under UK patent law.

In the court’s written ruling, Judge David Kitchin said that the case was "not concerned with the broader question whether technical advances generated by machines acting autonomously and powered by AI should be patentable".

A spokesperson for the IPO praised the court’s decision, noting that while there are "legitimate questions as to how the patent system and indeed intellectual property more broadly should handle such creations," the ruling provides clarification as to the law as it stands in relation to the patenting of creations of artificial intelligence machines".

Reacting to the ruling, lawyers for Thaler said that the ruling “establishes that UK patent law is currently wholly unsuitable for protecting inventions generated autonomously by AI machines and as a consequence wholly inadequate in supporting any industry that relies on AI in the development of new technologies”.

This is not the first time that Thaler has lost a legal fight over his case for patenting inventions created by AI. He lost a similar case in the US earlier this year against the US Patent and Trademark Office, with the Supreme Court declining to hear the challenge.

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