The Emotional Perception saga has become a defining case for patenting AI inventions in the UK. Most significantly, the Supreme Court judgement1 of February 2026 has reformed the examination of mixed-typed inventions in general, i.e. inventions containing a ‘mixture’ of technical and non-technical features.
The UK IPO’s latest word on the matter arrived in Patent Decision O/0894/262, issued on 1 October 2026. Below, we discuss the decision and its implications for AI-related inventions.
The story so far
The UK patent application at issue was directed to using an artificial neural network (ANN) to recommend media files based on ‘semantic’ similarity between files derived from measurable properties of the files.
The application was originally refused by the UK IPO due to being excluded as a ‘computer program as such’ under s1(2) Patents Act 1977 (i.e. which sets out a non-exhaustive list of excluded or non-technical subject matter categories).
A series of appeals escalated the case to be considered by the Supreme Court where it was ultimately held that the UK IPO should adopt new guidance for examining patentability of AI and other mixed-type inventions. The new guidance combines the two-hurdle and intermediate step approach used by the European Patent Office (EPO) with the existing UK approach to examining inventive step (i.e. the ‘Pozzoli’ test).
The case was then remitted back to the UK IPO for reconsideration under the new guidance. This reconsideration eventually resulted in another UK IPO hearing in August 2026 and concluded with the decision (O/0894/26) issued last week.
The UK IPO’s new approach
Although the application was refused again, the decision is particularly interesting because it provides one of the earliest detailed examples of how the UK IPO is applying the UK’s new approach to examining AI and computer-implemented inventions.
One of the more notable aspects of the decision is the simple manner in which the Hearing Officer applied the ‘intermediate step’, which involves identifying features of the claim that contribute to the technical character of the claim. This is done to allow features not contributing to technical character to be effectively filtered out either before the analysis of inventive step or as part of the inventive step analysis.
This intermediate step was performed by the Hearing Officer as follows:
“Go through each feature of the claim in turn and decide if it is:
- a technical feature that contributes to the technical character of the claim;
- a technical feature that does not contribute to the technical character of the claim;
iii. a non-technical feature that nonetheless contributes to the technical character of the claim;
- a non-technical feature that does not contribute to the technical character of the claim;
Even if it is not straightforward to explicitly identify the technical character in advance of steps (i-iv), the features can still be categorised, as above, by asking if they are contributing something technical to the claim.”
Under the new guidance, only those features falling into categories (i) and (iii) can be considered to contribute to inventive step. In the present decision, the Hearing Officer performed this filtering step before considering inventive step. After excluding non-technical features (i.e. one of them being the fact that the files output are ‘semantically better’ files) the technical character of the invention was defined to be: “computer hardware running a program that selects and outputs a file”.
The application then fell down shortly after the ‘intermediate step’ as this broad definition was found to be clearly obvious over the common general knowledge. Thus, the decision lacked any substantive discussion of prior art.
However, the Hearing Officer suggested that, where good prior art is available, it may sometimes be more efficient to identify the distinguishing features first and then consider whether those features contribute to technical character. For patent practitioners, it is interesting that the UK IPO appear to be flexible in how the new approach is applied, though it would have been useful to see this potentially more complex approach applied in the present case.
A question of semantics?
The fate of this particular case hinged on whether outputting a semantically better file was to be considered technical or non-technical.
The Hearing Officer focused on the meaning of the term ‘semantically’ and ‘semantics’, looking both to dictionary definitions and explanations provided in the patent specification to determine what was actually meant by the term. It was determined by the Hearing Officer that this improvement was non-technical as it was ‘better’ only in a subjective psychological sense as given meaning by a human being.
For patent practitioners, this reinforces the European perspective on what is considered technical and non-technical . Simply describing an AI output as more meaningful, more relevant, or more semantically aligned is unlikely to be convincing for UK patent examination. In other words, the fact that an AI system produces a result that humans might regard as better does not necessarily mean that the improvement is technical. Instead, during preparation of the patent application, drafters should probe further to identify and emphasise any further technical effects relating to the invention, for example, in how it is applied to a field of technology or technical purpose or in how it is implemented and adapted to the hardware or network on which it runs.
Key takeaways
This decision usefully provides an early indication of how the UK IPO intends to apply the post-Emotional Perception approach to patentability examination. The Hearing Officer’s reasoning drives home that applicants should not rely solely on assertions that an AI tool simply produces more meaningful, relevant or accurate outputs. Instead, patent applications should clearly identify and emphasise further technical effects arising from the invention. Without features that meaningfully contribute to technical character, a claim to improvements in AI-generated content may be dismissed as a matter of semantics rather than patentability.
Footnotes
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