Our recent trend analysis of patents at the European Patent Office that are related to AI showed 24% year on year growth in patent applications, outstripping the overall patent growth over the same period and continuing the trend since at least 2015. The same analysis showed that the percentage of cases related to AI that were allowed in 2021 increased to 64%. It therefore seems clear that businesses are investing in AI related inventions, and that this investment is being rewarded by those inventions being patented.
I should note that the article is really about whether things that are invented by AI can be patented. This is an area that seems to generate a huge amount of interest, but to me is something of a non-issue, at least from a European perspective. It is currently, and I suspect will be for a long time yet, the case that things alleged to be invented by AI are really invented by people, either by the design of their model, by the way they train their model, for example the way in which they generate training data for training the model, or by the realisation that machine learning can be applied to a particular problem. All of these things can generally be patented in Europe.
Inability to patent AI creations could hit business investment
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