Comment Future AI could be a challenge for US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) officials, who need to wrap their heads around complex technology that's perhaps not quite compatible with today's laws. Under the Department of Commerce, the USPTO's core mission is to protect intellectual property, or IP. Creators file patent applications in hope of keeping competitors from copying their inventions without permission, and patents are supposed to allow businesses to thrive with their own novel designs while not stifling wider innovation. Fast evolving technologies, such as deep learning, are pushing the limits of today's IP policies and rules. Clerks are trying to apply traditional patent approval rules to non-trivial machine-learning inventions, and bad decisions could result in a stranglehold on competition among public and private AI creators.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an increasingly valuable tool for diagnostics and drug development and is being used to make medical devices more adaptive. However, the U.S. Supreme Court's 2014 decision in Alice has made it difficult to patent inventions involving AI, seeing as the court's derived test for Section 101 of the Patent Act prevents abstract ideas from being patented. Interestingly enough, the court's decision failed to define what an abstract idea is, resulting in Section 101 often being applied unevenly. Nimalka Wickramasekera, an Intellectual Property litigator and Los Angeles partner, discusses in BioWorld's article "Supreme Court's Alice Decision Leaves Drug, Device Firms in AI Wonderland" that Section 101 proves to be a big hurdle for evolving technology, and AI specifically, "since people are still wrapping their heads around what they're claiming as the invention." She added that she "wouldn't be surprised if every patent application based on AI has had at least one rejection at the USPTO…To get around the court's prohibition on patents for abstract ideas, AI inventors must go beyond the algorithm and its application in computing devices."