Best practice for patenting AI

The US Intellectual Property Owners Association has published extremely valuable new guidance on best practice for patenting AI.

The guidance, entitled “Protecting Inventions Relating to Artificial Intelligence: Best Practices”, includes:

• questions to ask inventors to flush out technical features (such as inputs, pre- and post-processing, architecture and training process);
• patent counsel’s role in identifying potential ethical problems (such as bias, privacy and social impact);
• cross-border considerations;
• the law on inventorship, including AI as inventor;
• drafting tips for excluded subject matter and sufficiency (and best mode);
• choosing between patent or trade secret protection; and
• drafting tips and other considerations for enforceability, such as detectable features, cloud deployment and standard-compliant features.

As that list immediately demonstrates, this is an extremely useful guide to AI-related patenting: “all killer, no filler”.