Dr. Stephen Thaler is the owner of an AI machine that he calls the "Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience" or "DABUS" for short.5 In 2019, Dr. Thaler filed U.S. patent applications claiming "a light beacon that flashes in a new and inventive manner to attract attention," which he called a "Neural Flame," and a "beverage container based on fractal geometry," called a "Fractal Container."6 In Dr. Thaler's telling, DABUS is "a type of'creativity machine,' " which "conceived" the Neural Flame and the Fractal Container. As such, Dr. Thaler argues that DABUS should be considered "the sole inventor" of the Neural Flame and the Fractal Container.7 According to Dr. Thaler, he spent a decade building on his earlier work to develop DABUS, which he calls "a totally new AI paradigm," one that can "appreciate [its] creations"8 and produce a "human readable" form of "pidgin language."9

In a test case for these issues, a team led by Professor Ryan Abbott at the University of Surrey has filed several patent applications for inventions which they claim were invented by an AI named DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience). The inventions in question are a'Fractal Container' and a'Neural Flame'. Patent applications to both of these inventions have been filed with the UK IPO, USPTO and EPO. PCT applications to these inventions have also been filed. The'Fractal Container' patent application relates to a container having a wall with a fractal profile.