Who gets credit when AI designs a new drug?
▼ Summary
– US courts ruled that only humans can be named inventors on patents, even if an AI was fundamental to a discovery.
– The ruling came from a test case where Ryan Abbott sought to name the AI DABUS as inventor of a food container, arguing no human contributed to its design.
– An appeals court in Washington, DC, dismissed philosophical questions about AI rights, citing that US law defines an inventor as an “individual,” meaning a human being.
– Patent attorney Sarah Korman stated that without a human inventor, there is no invention or patent, but acknowledged laws will need to evolve with AI.
– The US Patent and Trademark Office itself recognized that AI systems could perform acts that would constitute inventorship if performed by a human.
The legal world has stumbled onto a curious contradiction: even when artificial intelligence does the heavy lifting in a discovery, the law insists that only a flesh-and-blood human can claim the title of inventor. This creates a fascinating gap in intellectual property law, one that courts are only beginning to wrestle with.
The issue came to a head thanks to Ryan Abbott, a partner at the Los Angeles firm Brown, Neri, Smith & Khan. Abbott took on a pro bono case that put an AI named DABUS in the spotlight as the purported inventor of a novel food container. The container’s intricate geometric surface allows for excellent heat transfer and easy stacking, and Abbott argued that since no human had a hand in its design, the AI itself should be listed as the inventor.
On its face, the case invited deep philosophical debates about whether machines could hold legal rights or what truly happens in that flash of insight that yields a better mousetrap. But a federal appeals court in Washington, DC, sidestepped those questions in 2022, calling them “metaphysical matters” irrelevant to the ruling. The court instead pointed to plain statutory language: US law defines an inventor as an “individual,” and the ordinary meaning of that word is a human being.
That settles it, at least for now. Machines are not people, so they cannot be inventors.
“There needs to be a human inventor or there’s no invention and no patent,” says Sarah Korman, a patent attorney who serves as chief business officer and legal officer for Isomorphic Labs, an Alphabet spinout aiming to use AI for drug discovery. Speaking at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech event last year, Korman acknowledged that “no doubt” the law will need to adapt as AI’s role in innovation grows.
The tension is real, because nobody disputes that AI can generate inventions. In fact, the US Patent and Trademark Office has itself conceded that “an AI system, like other tools, may perform acts that, if performed by a human, could constitute inventorship under our laws.” The question is how long the legal system can maintain this human-only stance as AI systems become more autonomous and require less oversight from their creators. For now, the courts have drawn a bright line, but the pressure to redraw it is only building.
(Source: MIT Technology Review)
