The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is rejecting far fewer applications for patents related to artificial intelligence since it clarified earlier this year which inventions are patent eligible, director Andrei Iancu said.
The rejection rate for AI patent applications jumped to 60% after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2014 ruling in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int’l , Iancu told attorneys Sept. 25 at the Intellectual Property Owners Association’s annual meeting. The decision, which set up a two-part eligibility test, led courts to cancel hundreds of software patents for covering ineligible abstract ideas.
“Think about that, 60 percent of office actions ...