KIPO Publishes Examination Guidelines on Artificial Intelligence

The Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) announced Patent Examination Guidelines for key technology areas related to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, including machine learning based artificial intelligence ("AI"), on January 18, 2021. In the Examination Guidelines for AI, KIPO outlines specific guidelines on description and novelty/inventiveness requirements for different categories of AI inventions (e.g., AI model training invention and AI application invention, as depicted below), in addition to eligibility requirements which correspond to that of computer-related inventions. In particular, KIPO's Examination Guidelines provide examples of various AI inventions with practical drafting tips on enablement (Article 42(3)(i) of Patent Act) and inventiveness requirements (Article 29(2)). Under Article 42(3)(i), the description of an invention shall be written clearly and fully so that a person with ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) to which the invention pertains can easily practice the claimed invention. For an AI invention, KIPO suggests that the description of the technical problem, solution, and specific technical configuration (e.g., training data, data preprocessing, trained model, and loss function, etc.) be included to enable a POSITA to practice the claimed invention, unless the technical configuration is well known in the art.