AI patent allowed for the first time

The court held both artificial neural networks (ANNs), which create sentient-like user experiences through technology, and the training of ANNs are patentable in the UK.

The intellectual property belongs to London-based creative studio AI Venture Studio Time Machine Capital Squared (TMC²) and its subsidiary company Emotional Perception AI Ltd (EPAI). EPAI filed a patent application in 2019 for a novel technique that permits the trained ANN to align its output closer towards how a human semantically perceives content. The application was rejected on the basis the Patents Act 1977, s 1(2)(c) excludes ‘a program for a computer… as such’ from protection.

Granting the appeal in EPAI v Comptroller-General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks [2023] EWHC 2948 (Ch) this week, Sir Anthony Mann said: ‘The courts have had to grapple from time to time with the difficulties of this concept in relation to what I can call traditional computers and software. This appeal raises new questions… I am told that this issue has not yet arisen in any of the authorities.’

Sir Anthony concluded that he considered ‘insofar as necessary, the trained hardware ANN is capable of being an external technical effect which prevents the exclusion applying to any prior computer program’.

TMC² has secured multiple complementary patent rights for this technology in the US, but said the UKIPO had been slow to move away from entrenched ideas on patentability of computer implemented inventions ‘CIIs’. It said the ruling would be important for the markets and banking sectors where emotional perception is being developed for natural language processing economic and financial crime detection and sentiment analysis.  

Bruce Dearling, TMC² patent attorney, said: ‘This ruling opens the door for UK AI to now accelerate and puts the UK on a better global footing to reward technical innovation.

The impact of this decision and any related patent cannot be understated.’ 

Joe Lyske, co-founder of TMC² and co-author of the patent said: ‘It’s a game-changer for the whole AI industry. It also shows yet again, that the UK is a world leader in AI and we are proud to be recognised as such with this ruling.’