“That may end up being where we land, but that’s a pretty big line to cross,” said Senator Chris Coons, the chairman of the Judiciary subcommittee on intellectual property.
If granting A.I. inventor status is a stretch today, stronger intellectual property protection for the fast-evolving technology is not.
Mr. Coons, a Delaware Democrat, and Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, introduced a bill last month to clarify what kinds of innovations are eligible for patents. It is intended as a legislative fix to the uncertainty raised by a series of Supreme Court decisions. Patents on artificial intelligence, along with medical diagnostics and biotechnology, would most likely become easier to obtain, legal experts say.
The bill is not about artificial intelligence specifically, but it “recognizes the direction of travel relative to A.I.” toward stronger patent protection, said David Kappos, a former director of the patent office and a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore.
At the Senate hearing, Dr. Abbott made the case for A.I. invention, helped by an odd-looking drink container he held up and described. It was created by an A.I. system trained on general knowledge. It had no training in container design, and it was not asked to make one.
The A.I. was built to combine simple ideas and concepts into more complex ones and identify when one had a positive outcome, a process repeated again and again. The resulting design was fed into a 3-D printer. The container employs fractal geometry to improve heat transfer, a kind of anti-Thermos. It could, for example, be used to quickly make iced tea, boiled, steeped and refrigerated.
The container is easy to hold, difficult to drink from and not headed for commercial production yet. But it is certainly novel, and it is entirely the creation of an A.I. system without human control.