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AI patent examination guidlines released by UK Intellectual Property Office

United KingdomScotland
22/09/2022
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AI patent examination guidelines have now been released by the UK Intellectual Property Office and provide extremely useful guidance for patent stakeholders.

The examination guidelines are available at the following link and include detail about the legal basis for assessing patent eligibility of inventions in this field as well as some concrete examples.

Examining patent applications relating to artificial intelligence (AI) inventions: The Guidance - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

The guidelines include extremely useful material about how the requirement for sufficiency will be assessed. This is particularly useful for applicants as there is often difficulty determining what level of detail to include in patent application documents around the architecture of machine learning models and around the training data use.

Each of the concrete examples includes claim language and explanation of whether the claim is likely to be acceptable or not. Generally speaking the examples appear to follow the situation as currently in place at the European Patent Office.

The UK AI patent examination guidelines were created in response to a consultation carried out by the UK IPO and are extremely welcomed. Today a speaker from the UK IPO mentioned release of the AI patent examination guidelines during the WIPO conversation on frontier technologies. It was explained that the guidelines were created in collaboration with patent attorneys and will be revised as there are developments in the law.

The UK AI patent examination guidelines are one of several such guidelines issued by patent offices around the world including Korea, Japan, and the European Patent Office and others.

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