Delhi high court to weigh whether AI can be named as a patent inventor

India's Delhi High Court has issued notice to the Indian Patent Office in an appeal that asks, for the first time in the country, whether an AI system can be recognised as the inventor on a patent application.

The case was brought by American scientist Stephen Thaler, who appealed against an order by the Assistant Controller of Patents that refused his application for a food container said to have been autonomously generated by his AI system, DABUS, short for Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience. The Patent Office rejected the application on three grounds: the surviving claims lacked an inventive step, DABUS could not be recognised as the "true and first inventor", and Thaler had not fulfilled requirements relating to declaration of inventorship and proof of right.

Thaler's legal team has argued that the Patents Act, 1970 does not expressly require an inventor to be a natural person. The appeal contends that Section 2(1)(y), which defines the "true and first inventor", only excludes the first importer of an invention or a person to whom an invention is first communicated from outside India.. Thaler is not seeking legal personality for DABUS; rather, his position is that DABUS must be named as inventor to correctly identify the source of the inventive concept, with patent rights vesting in him as the system's owner. The appeal also warns that if AI-generated inventions are excluded from patent protection, applicants may be incentivised to conceal AI's role or keep such inventions as trade secrets.

Justice Jyoti Singh has sought a response from the Indian Patent Office, and the matter is next listed for hearing on September 18.

Courts and patent offices in the US, the UK and the European Union have consistently declined to recognise AI systems as inventors, holding that existing frameworks require a natural person. India's case could test whether the country's statutory language leaves room for a different reading, a question that matters to any organisation filing patents for products or processes where AI played a generative role.