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”.