On 5 September 2025 the UK High Court rejected the latest attempt to secure UK patent rights for an invention said to have been generated by the Artificial Intelligence system DABUS. The court confirmed that inventorship under the Patents Act requires a natural person to be named and that an Artificial Intelligence system cannot be listed as inventor. The decision continues Dr Stephen Thaler’s long-running campaign to have DABUS recognised as an inventor and follows the Supreme Court’s 2023 judgment, which similarly held that DABUS is not an inventor because it is not a natural person.
The judgment addresses two related UK patent filings: a parent application filed as the UK national phase of an international application that named DABUS as inventor, and a subsequent divisional application. The UKIPO required a Form 7 statement of inventorship by 2 October 2021. Instead of naming a human inventor, Dr Thaler relied on inventorship information in the international phase and later filed an auxiliary request asserting no person was an inventor and invoking entitlement under Section 7(2)(b) of the Patents Act. The UKIPO found the inventorship information noncompliant and treated the parent as terminated on 25 May 2022 for failure to provide a compliant Form 7 within the statutory period.
Dr Thaler filed a divisional application before the parent’s termination was recorded but maintained that no human inventor existed. Subsequent filings sought to claim entitlement as a successor in title under Section 7(2)(c) and, after the Supreme Court decision, to name Dr Thaler as inventor. The UKIPO rejected these changes as inconsistent with prior positions and because the divisional could not validly claim divisional status once the parent was deemed withdrawn. The High Court upheld the UKIPO on appeal, finding the parent deemed withdrawn, the divisional filed out of time and losing divisional status, and that Dr Thaler could not replace DABUS with a named human inventor after asserting no human inventor existed. The judgment also noted that consideration might be given to requiring identification of Artificial Intelligence-generated inventions, as some other offices have done.
