Decisions · Policy · Germany

'AI-generated inventions': time to get the record straight?

Daria Kim (Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition) · 2020 · Proposal · non-binding

69 GRUR International 443 (2020), doi:10.1093/grurint/ikaa061

AI and inventorship

Can AI be an inventor?

Human inventors only

So-called AI-generated inventions still rest on human-defined instructions, so humans remain the inventors

Why hereCoded at the pole: its core holding or recommendation answers the question outright.

What it says

Kim describes AI techniques as methods of computational problem solving rather than cognitive autonomy. Because neural networks and evolutionary algorithms need detailed human instructions, separating human from non-human ingenuity is artificial, and the case for non-human inventorship needs a sounder technical basis.

Pushes back on the premise behind DABUS: the human is still the inventor.

Sources

This record

Data as of 2026-10-21.

Drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources linked above; not yet reviewed by a lawyer. Methodology

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