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(Vivien Lou, “High stakes for investors as Fed tries curing inflation without causing a recession”, Yahoo, , accessed 7-14-24)

What's at stake is a hard landing,' which could include a bear market and earnings recession, said Eric Sterner, chief investment officer at Apollon Wealth Management

[Haochen, Professor of Law, University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. Artificial intelligence inventions. Florida State University Law Review, 50(1), 61-122. ] GDI-MAM

Patent Thicket Generators and Patent Trolls

[Jessica, 2023, Let Me Get My Human for That: The Struggles of A Broken Patent System for Al Inventors, Southwestern Journal of International Law, 29(1), 160-186. https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/sjlta29&i=166]

Allowing Al inventors to hold patents will decrease innovation because the invention will essentially become dead since Al cannot license or produce it because Al is merely a shell for its owners. As property, it will never meet the human threshold needed to own property itself or to enter contracts. These functions are essential to the furtherance of the invention. One of the many legal rights granted to the patent owner is the power to give permission or to license third parties to use the invention based on agreed upon terms. 85 The patent owner also can sell the patent to another owner.86 All of these scenarios would involve the inventor to grant legal rights to another person. Traditionally, this transfer of rights occurs through a contract. The basic elements of a legally enforceable contract in the U.S. include mutual assent, expressed by a valid offer and acceptance; consideration; capacity; and legality.8 7 Al would have difficulties satisfying these elements. The Restatement of Contracts defines consideration in terms of exchange and requires that a promise be supported by consideration in order to be legally enforceable. 88 Considering that Al is property itself, and cannot legally own or transfer property to another, Al cannot properly give adequate consideration. Second, having the capacity to legally enter a contract means a person is of "legal capacity to incur at least voidable contractual duties,"89 and someone who is not "under guardianship, or an infant, or mentally ill or defective, or intoxicated." 90 AI neither meets the qualification of being "a person," and opponents of Al patent rights will argue that Al is not "of sound mind." Thus, Al cannot legally enter contracts to promote the furtherance of its invention.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will become a ubiquitous part of society in the future. Scientist across the world is trying to develop strong AI which will be autonomous and will have the capacity to think. As the human interaction increases with these machines it will consequently give rise to legal issues. Such as who will be held accountable for any criminal liability arising from the actions of AI. Therefore, our legal system needs to be prepared for these upcoming challenges. Attribution of legal personality to artificial intelligence can be an effective measure to check all potential challenges by the introduction of AI in our society. This paper discussed methodologies for attribution of legal personhood to AI. That, how by merely vesting legal personhood in AI our current legal system will be capable enough to resolve any issue arising due to technological development in the field of AI. This will also ensure that our interactions with AI are harmonious and occur as intended.

Christopher Markou, “From Rule of Law to Legal Singularity,” Is Law Computable? https://www.academia.edu/44516947/From_Rule_of_Law_to_Legal_Singularity

On the vexed question of whether to attribute legal personality to AI systems, Abbot and Sarch warn against the danger of ‘rights creep’, as has happened already with the attribution, in a number of jurisdictions, of constitutionally-protected human rights to corporations. One solution, they suggest, would be to designate a ‘responsible person, in practice likely to be a corporation, as the ultimate guarantor of an AI. They also consider the costs and benefits of requiring mandatory registration and reporting for certain AI systems.

Harsh Amrit and Nitya Malviya 21, “Legal Personhood to AI and Human Rights: An Analysis,” The Human Rights Blog, 05-26-2021, https://casihrrgnul.wordpress.com/2021/05/26/legal-personhood-to-ai-and-human-rights-an-analysis/

AI can be most inclusively defined as, a system that can think and act, based on its experience[i]. AIs are getting technologically advanced and gaining the capability to act independently (Tesla self-driving car, robotic nurses, virtual assistants, etc.) Till now, such systems have been treated as objects of law and any act of the system leading to damage would make the producers and the programmer liable. However, with the advent of newer and more sophisticated AI, determining liability has become a challenge. There is an increasing need to treat AI as subjects of law by granting them legal personhood. As it stands, however, people and institutions are still accountable for the actions of AI. As per the UNCITRAL, the person on whose behalf the Computer was working would be liable in the case of an unwanted circumstance. But, in the case of an advanced system, where multiple AI is doing the job, it would be difficult to trace the person responsible, leading to a responsibility gap.[ii] Like in high-frequency trading, where a large number of financial transactions are performed in fractions of a second by AI, the situation would be unusual for determining the responsibility if something illegal happens. Therefore, granting personhood to AIs would ensure smoothness of work and address the responsibility gap.

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) decided[1] on April 22 that the artificial intelligence (AI) known as DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience) could not be named as an inventor on an application for a patent on an improved beverage container. The USPTO rejected this bid for AI inventorship, citing a panoply of statutory language, including 35 USC §§ 100, 101, and 115; the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure; and Federal Circuit cases[2] holding that “only natural persons can be ‘inventors.’”

While acknowledging that these prior rulings dealt with issues of corporate inventorship, the USPTO concluded that the holdings are equally applicable to issues of AI inventorship since the discussion of “conception as being a ‘formation in the mind of the inventor’ and a ‘mental act’ is equally applicable to machines and indicates that conception—the touchstone of inventorship—must be performed by a natural person.”[3]

Yet another pathway to escalation could arise from a cascading series of cyberstrikes and counterstrikes against vital national infrastructure rather than on military targets. All major powers, along with Iran and North Korea, have developed and deployed cyberweapons designed to disrupt and destroy major elements of an adversary’s key economic systems, such as power grids, financial systems, and transportation networks. As noted, Russia has infiltrated the U.S. electrical grid, and it is widely believed that the United States has done the same in Russia. The Pentagon has also devised a plan known as “Nitro Zeus,” intended to immobilize the entire Iranian economy and so force it to capitulate to U.S. demands or, if that approach failed, to pave the way for a crippling air and missile attack. The danger here is that economic attacks of this sort, if undertaken during a period of tension and crisis, could lead to an escalating series of tit-for-tat attacks against ever more vital elements of an adversary’s critical infrastructure, producing widespread chaos and harm and eventually leading one side to initiate kinetic attacks on critical military targets, risking the slippery slope to nuclear conflict. For example, a Russian cyberattack on the U.S. power grid could trigger U.S. attacks on Russian energy and financial systems, causing widespread disorder in both countries and generating an impulse for even more devastating attacks. At some point, such attacks “could lead to major conflict and possibly nuclear war.” These are by no means the only pathways to escalation resulting from the offensive use of cyberweapons. Others include efforts by third parties, such as proxy states or terrorist organizations, to provoke a global nuclear crisis by causing early-warning systems to generate false readings (“spoofing”) of missile launches. Yet, they do provide a clear indication of the severity of the threat. As states’ reliance on cyberspace grows and cyberweapons become more powerful, the dangers of unintended or accidental escalation can only grow more severe.

According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Centre, by June of 2020, daily digital crime in the U.S. had risen by 75%, since the start of the stay-at-home restrictions generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission reports that by June 30th, it had received almost 140,000 reports since the start of the year, nearly as many as it received for all of 2019. Interpol’s cyber-crime division, reports that as the pandemic continued, criminal networks have increasingly shifted their targets to big companies, governments, and critical infrastructure, away from individuals and small businesses. Gartner estimates that businesses on average spend 5% to 8% of their overall technology budget on cybersecurity. As of June 2020, it predicts a 33.3% increase in spending on cloud security, over 2019. Other areas seeing growth are data security at 7.2%, application security at 6.2%, identity access management, and infrastructure protection. By the end of 2020, these estimates may turn out to be low considering that businesses are increasingly employing remote working, which may require additional cybersecurity spending to protect their systems adequately. A Cybersecurity Ventures report issued in late-2017, states that cybercrime damage is estimated to reach $6 trillion annually by 2021. Due to the convergence of an escalation in the number of security vulnerabilities, an increase in hacker capabilities and tools as well as the GDPR legislation enacted in the European Union, the estimated costs due to cybercrime may be conservative. In order to meet the cybersecurity challenges of tomorrow, information security companies and governments must invest and rapidly deploy new, innovative systems. A potential impediment is the growth of cybersecurity technology-related intellectual property lawsuits.

Cyber Security Patent Lawsuits on the Rise and The Need for Shared Innovation in Cyber Security

These are, of course, no less than the enabling technologies for a global surveillance state—though nobody is admitting as much. While it is logical that a complex society of ten billion people requires more laws, regulations and enforcement that a nineteenth century world of half a billion humans, the advent of quantum surveillance will over-ride and eliminate most aspects of individual freedom. Without strict safeguards, transparency and public oversight, it could potentially render everyone, in eff ect, state property. On present trends, this will probably be accomplished with the co-operation of the private sector, via internet companies and banks, and with the gullible consent of voters reassured by government claims that spying on everyone is ‘essential to national security’. With many transnational corporations now larger, wealthier and more powerful than individual countries or governments, one of the chief and most intrusive objectives of universal surveillance will be marketing—to precisely target every individual with an avalanche of products and services to anticipate their every whim, before they even know they have it. And fi nally, political parties and religious bodies may exploit the technology not only to spy on their opponents but to ensure the loyalty of supporters, who may then be coerced by threats to expose aspects of the private lives. Th is is the dawn of the nanocracy, the rule of the Dwarf Lords (see Pamlin et al. 2015 ).

Like all advanced technologies—and despite all the self-serving hype by the scientists working on it—there is no guarantee such omnipotence will be used wisely, benignly, ethically or well, be regulated, publicly supervised or even its details widely known. Indeed, the odds are it will fi rst be employed by political, economic and religious elites to spy on and control those they deem a threat to their power, beliefs, wealth or freedom of action—or else an opportunity to spot customers, recruits or agents of infl uence. Edward Snowden, who witnessed the birth of the secretive age of universal espionage and blew the whistle on it, told Australia’s ABC in May 2015 that the power to search both our content and metadata is “incredibly empowering for governments, incredibly disempowering for civil society”. It could lead to what he termed a ‘turnkey tyranny’ in which governments claim to follow due process but secretly ratchet-up their level of intrusion into private lives without disclosing it. “Th ey are collecting information about everyone, in every place, regardless of whether they have done anything wrong,” he warned (Snowden 2015 ).

Over the past year, artificial intelligence has burst into the public consciousness, rapidly ascending from an obscure tech term to an integral part of our daily lives. It’s an exciting and fascinating rise that offers a glimpse of what is to come.

In the coming years, a new wave of cutting-edge technologies — such as quantum computing, machine learning, biotechnology and advanced robotics — will fundamentally reshape the way we live, work and connect. However, the extent to which these technologies enrich or undermine our future depends on the values and motivations of those who craft them.

Last month, as the tech industry was buzzing about ChatGPT, the research arm of the Defense Department put out an artificial intelligence announcement of its own: An AI bot had successfully flown an F-16 fighter jet in the skies above Southern California.

The news got relatively little attention, but it revealed an overlooked truth: The race to develop the next generation of AI isn’t just between tech companies like Microsoft and Google — it’s also between nations, which are working furiously to foster and develop their own technology.

The second category of antidemocratic actions are those that take place in developing countries. Unlike in the developed world, where China’s political and economic coercion and “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy have engendered a growing backlash, Beijing has received a warmer welcome in many developing countries, where elites hope to learn from a political system that has enabled China’s transformation into the world’s second-largest economy. In a growing number of fragile democracies, Beijing has captured small coteries of corrupt elites and helped them centralize power by insulating them from the demands of civil society and deploying Chinese technology to repress their citizens and help them maintain power indefinitely. This is how the CCP is exporting authoritarianism around the globe: not through seminars on Marxist ideology, as some analysts have claimed, but through a broad range of antidemocratic activities. China does so less out of a desire to spread its ideology than to expand its influence and economic advantage. Its favored partners are not fervent adherents of Marxism-Leninism but rather officials, business leaders, media tycoons, and others who view the adoption of a nondemocratic governance model that concentrates power in the hands of the few—and shuts out the many—as a route to long-term influence. This preference for antidemocratic collaborators, coupled with China’s opaque and corrupt investment practices, further corrodes democratic institutions, as murky deals struck by Chinese banks and state-owned enterprises encourage a more corrupt and unaccountable class of political elites all too eager to undermine their country’s long-term prosperity in return for personal gain. China offers more than simple inspiration for a nondemocratic governance model: it provides the tools, training, and resources that permit leaders to ignore democratic countries’ demands for good governance and respect for individual rights as a condition of aid and investment. The CCP regularly conducts large-scale training programs for foreign officials on how to guide public opinion, control civil society, and implement Chinese-style cybersecurity policies in their home countries. A growing number of countries have drawn inspiration from China to pursue laws controlling social media or to build Internet firewalls modeled on China’s own “Great Firewall.” China also provides increasingly sophisticated surveillance technology and internal security training to established authoritarian and fragile democratic governments, enabling them to better suppress dissent and control their own citizens. In countries such as Uganda and Zambia, CCP-linked organizations have shared technology and training with autocratic and autocratic-leaning governments, allowing them to monitor their citizens, muzzle media and civil society, and impose repressive Internet rules. The CCP has also engaged in more explicit political intervention by interfering directly in the political processes of other sovereign countries to support China-friendly politicians and policies and by co-opting local civic groups and journalists to stymie negative portrayals of China’s international engagement and to protect its ties to corrupt local elites. These efforts are not intended to overthrow democracies or other ideologically dissimilar regimes but to help ensure that China-friendly policies and investment climates will prevail regardless of who is in power. Nevertheless, such efforts erode the accountability of leaders to their citizens, weaken the independence of the media and civil society, and ultimately tilt the playing field to favor illiberal leaders looking to import elements of China’s model of governance into their countries’ political systems. This kind of political encroachment maintains the form of a democratic system while hollowing out the actual substance of a functioning democracy from the inside, making the slide toward authoritarianism harder to detect. It should come as no surprise that the CCP’s vision of successful governance has no room for independent checks on state power, such as a substantive civil society or healthy opposition. In the model that Beijing is selling and that more and more countries are buying, dissent is not a legitimate expression of individual interests but an attempt to sabotage collective nation-building efforts. Opposition, in other words, is not political participation but state subversion. The popularization of these ideas in a growing number of developing countries is helping the CCP realize its vision for a revised global order in which a plurality of governance models—democratic and authoritarian alike—can exist as equally legitimate political choices. The last category of international antidemocratic actions involves those aimed at weakening international institutions that instill democratic norms and creating new ones that do not, thereby neutering the liberal presumptions that prevail in the current global order. China uses the clout it has gained by consolidating influence in UN agencies to ensure institutional alignment with Chinese priorities: it has wielded its authority in the International Telecommunications Union, for instance, to promote policies that facilitate the authoritarian use of technology to repress citizens. Beijing’s efforts to topple the current liberal order—which China views as an obstacle to its emergence as a great power—are unprecedented. China is enshrining its own ideological concepts and foreign policy strategies into international statements of consensus, substituting Chinese concepts, such as the “right to development” and “Internet sovereignty,” for more widely held values. It is also promoting its own view of human rights, in which governments can cite supposedly unique local conditions to justify disregard for individual or minority rights and in which civil or political rights are secondary to so-called economic and social rights. Taken together, Beijing’s illiberal efforts undercut democracy in the developed world, the developing world, and in international institutions amount to an assault on the norms, rules, and ethics by which the world is governed. They threaten to usher in an increasingly undemocratic world populated by regimes that are beholden to Beijing and unsympathetic to the interests of the United States and its allies. Such regimes would be less accountable to their populations, less committed to individual rights, less responsible to international institutions that uphold democratic norms and universal values, and more dedicated to controlling and suppressing information. In short, if Beijing isn’t trying to remake the world in its image, it is trying to make the world friendlier to its interests—and more welcoming to the rise of authoritarianism in general.

Not surprisingly, nascent global AI governance regimes remain ‘unorganized’, ‘immature’, and ‘fragmented’,3 where a range of state and non-state led initiatives and different actors have been competing for influence.4As an ambitious AI player, China has signalled strong interests in shaping, if not making, the emerging global AI order. With the open ambition of becoming a global AI superpower by 2030,5 China is envisioning its leadership role in shaping AI’s future.

This article provides a first in-depth analysis of China’s role in emerging global AI governance. It argues that China’s search for leadership in global AI governance is driven by not only domestic regulatory needs but also the desire to gain international norm and agenda setting power. China’s leadership ambition in global AI governance lies in the wider context of its aspiration to shift from a norm-taker towards a norm-shaper, if not maker. However, despite considerable efforts taken so far, this article suggests that realization of China’s leadership ambition in AI governance is facing enormous challenges especially when nascent global AI governance regimes under the influence of geopolitics and liberal democratic values have in effect allowed China limited room to demonstrate its leadership credentials.

At present, the authoritarianism business is booming. According to the Human Rights Foundation’s research, the citizens of 94 countries suffer under non-democratic regimes, meaning that 3.97 billion people are currently controlled by tyrants, absolute monarchs, military juntas or competitive authoritarians. That’s 53 percent of the world’s population. Statistically, then, authoritarianism is one of the largest — if not the largest — challenges facing humanity. Consider the scale of some of the world’s other crises. About 836 million live under extreme poverty, and 783 million lack clean drinking water. War and conflict have displaced 65 million from their homes. Between 1994 and 2013 an annual average of 218 million people were affected by natural disasters. These are terrible, seemingly intractable problems — but at least there are United Nations bodies, aid organizations and State Department teams dedicated to each one of them. Dictators and elected authoritarians, by contrast, get a free pass. The World Bank bails out repressive regimes on a regular basis. There is no anti-tyrant U.N. task force, no Sustainable Development Goals against tyranny, no army of activists. We, the authors, have experienced the ills of authoritarianism personally. One of us has been beaten, blacklisted and forced into exile by operatives of the Kremlin. Russian President Vladimir Putin has relentlessly pushed to crush freedom of speech, brazenly annex Crimea and increase his global military activities in ways that hark back to the Cold War. The other author has seen his mother shot by Venezuelan security forces and his first cousin languish for nearly three years in a military jail as a prisoner of conscience. Today Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro runs a regime that regularly imprisons dissidents, abuses protesters and engages in such widespread graft and corruption that the country is now undergoing a catastrophic economic collapse. Putin and Maduro have co-conspirators in all parts of the world, fellow would-be tyrants who are dismantling the free press, jailing opponents, manipulating elections and committing a host of human rights violations. In Turkey, a once-promising democracy is gasping for air. Its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has shut down 149 media outlets, shuttered more than 2,000 schools and universities, fired more than 120,000 civil servants and jailed more than 45,000 suspected dissenters. In North Korea, Kim Jong Un rules the most totalitarian government on Earth, brainwashing 25 million people and terrorizing them with public executions, forced famines and a vast network of concentration camps that reminded U.N. investigators of Pol Pot’s Cambodia and Nazi Germany. And there are so many lesser-known dictators in countries such as Bahrain, Kazakhstan and Equatorial Guinea, where tyrants pilfer their countries’ natural resources and pocket the profits in private off-shore accounts. To cover their atrocities, they hire lobbyists, public relations firms and even policy groups in the free world to whitewash their actions. If injustice and oppression aren’t bad enough, authoritarian governments bear an enormous social cost. Dictator-led countries have higher rates of mental illness, lower levels of health and life expectancy, and, as Amartya Sen famously argued, higher susceptibility to famine. Their citizens are less educated and file fewer patents. In 2016, more patents were filed in France than in the entire Arab world — not because Arabs are less entrepreneurial than the French, but because nearly all of them live under stifling authoritarianism. Clearly, the suppression of free expression and creativity has harmful effects on innovation and economic growth. Citizens of free and open societies such as Germany, South Korea and Chile witness advances in business, science and technology that Belarusans, Burmese and Cubans can only dream of. And consider that free nations do not go to war with each other. History has shown this to be the only ironclad law of political theory. Meanwhile, dictators are always at war, often with a foreign power and always with their own people. If you are worried about public health, poverty or peace, your mandate is clear: Oppose tyranny. Tragically, world institutions and organizations have failed to properly address authoritarianism. Western governments sometimes protest human rights violations in countries such as Russia, Iran, and North Korea — but routinely ignore them in places such as China and Saudi Arabia, in favor of upholding trade deals and security agreements. The United Nations, established to bring peace and justice to the world, includes Cuba, Egypt and Rwanda on its Human Rights Council. Here, a representative from a democracy carries the same legitimacy as a representative from a dictatorship. One acts on behalf of its citizens, while the other acts to silence them. Between June 2006 and August 2015 the Human Rights Council issued zero condemnations of repressive regimes in China, Cuba, Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

America urgently needs to rewrite its patent laws to recognize modern artificial intelligence technologies, business and IP leaders have said. This sentiment emerged from a series of hearings organized by the US Chamber of Commerce, during which experts from academia, industry, and government were invited to speak. The meetings, held last month, raised important questions plaguing the development of state-of-the-art AI models: should AI algorithms be patentable? And, separately, should these systems be granted patent rights for inventions they help create? Today's IP laws are outdated, it was argued. The rules dictating what types of innovations can be patented have stayed largely untouched since the historic Patent Act of 1793. Although the law is broad and states "any new and useful art, machine, manufacture or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement on any art, machine, manufacture or composition of matter" is potentially patentable, there other conditions that make it difficult to patent things like machine-learning models. Patents are only useful if they provide clear scientific and economic benefits to the country, the group argues. It's why the Patent Act states that descriptions of the inventions should "enable any person skilled in the art or science, of which it is a branch, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make, compound, and use the same." That means someone suitably skilled should be able to take a patent text and diagrams, understand what's going on, and reproduce the technology themselves. But take a system with a trained neural network. That collection of weights and values that mysteriously turns input data into output predictions is opaque and hard to interpret: experts often don't quite know why a model behaves the way it does, which makes explaining its inner workings in a patent difficult. Well, OK, let's just say the patent explains how to train the neural network to produce the same results, thus allowing the invention to be recreated. But reproducibility is notoriously difficult in machine learning. You need access to the training data and other settings to recreate it. That becomes problematic if the data is medical or personal info, or proprietary, because it would need to be made public as part of the patent filing, and not all the necessary settings and tweaks may be disclosed in an application. Patent examiners, therefore, may struggle with patent applications of AI technology, and reject submissions, if they find the text is confusing, or not interpretable or reproducible. Thus, changes are needed in the law to allow machine-learning systems to be accepted as novel inventions, it was argued. And being able to patent and protect these inventions encourages businesses to build commercial products, we're further told. Everyone gets to see the progression of tech and science, and inventors are granted rights to their specific part of it. It is absolutely crucial, and it is a matter of immediate national security "The patent code that [our founders] put in place was fantastic, however they did not anticipate DNA processing, artificial intelligence, cryptography, software code, and all of the modern technologies of the next industrial revolution," Andrei Iancu, former Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and ex-Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), said in a Chamber of Commerce statement on Monday. Rejecting AI patents, however, we're told, will keep knowledge of the latest commercial applications of the technology from the public and hamper innovation. "So, to say that the patent system, at least from that perspective, needs to modernize is an understatement. It is absolutely crucial, and it is a matter of immediate national security," Iancu added. The chamber noted China has surpassed the US in the number of international patent filings in 2019 and in 2020. If America is to hold a leadership position in AI, its leaders need to treat IP, such as machine learning breakthroughs, as a national asset, Brian Drake, federal chief technology officer at Accrete AI Government, a company focused on building enterprise-level AI applications, asserted. Because for one thing, he said, rival nations are pouring all their energies into developing machine-learning technology to use against the United States of America. "I'm talking about all the instruments of national power from our adversaries being directed at all of our national security instruments and economic power centers. That means their intelligence apparatuses, that means their direct and indirect funding apparatuses, that means their commercial military integration activities. All of those are being directed toward artificial intelligence. And make no mistake, it is about winning the future war," Drake said. Most experts agree AI algorithms should be patentable, but whether patent authorship or ownership rights should be given to machines that produce technologies, however, is debatable. Current IP laws do not recognize non-human entities as inventors, meaning machine-learning systems cannot be recognized as such. Stephen Thaler, founder of Imagination Engines, a company in Missouri, who applied in 2019 for two US patents which listed his machine named DABUS as the inventor, found this out the hard way when his applications were rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Thaler believes there is good reason to give machines at least authorship rights, as it would discourage humans from stealing computers' ideas and profiting from them – the originator would be on record in the patent office – he previously told The Register. But it's not clear that there is any practical use in recognizing software as inventors yet, considering they have no agency or capabilities to sue for infringement unlike humans. "To summarize, we cannot sustain innovation around AI without robust and reliable IP rights, which are essential to the prosperity of our innovative nation," Christian Hannon, a patent attorney serving in the Office of Policy and International Affairs at USPTO, said. "To grow our economy and stay globally competitive, we must promote invention and patenting more than ever."

"Current patent and copyright laws suggest that human creation is required to obtain IP protection. Specifically, a patent may be obtained by "[w]hoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof." 56 The use of the word "whoever" implies that only a person can be considered an "inventor." 57 Generally, a patent application must indicate the name of an inventor. 58 The inventor is the one "who conceived the invention" and "maintains intellectual domination of the work." 59 *The conception of an invention is the "complete performance of the mental part of the inventive act" and it is "the formation in the mind of the inventor of a definite and [365] permanent idea of the complete and operative invention as it is thereafter to be applied in practice . . . ." 60 Similar to "whoever," the use of the word "mind" seems to imply that the law assumes the inventor is a living individual. Despite this assumption, patent stakeholders in the U.S. recognize that AI can be more than just an assistant to humans in the inventing process. 61 There is evidence that inventions created by non-humans have been patented. 62 Thus, patent law needs to adapt to AI's emerging capabilities. Absent recognition that, at a minimum, an invention can be jointly invented by AI, the U.S. may be disadvantaged globally. For example, some foreign patent systems do not require the applicant to identify the inventor. 63 If U.S. law cannot protect AI inventions in the U.S., the result could hamper future U.S. innovation and investment."

I. CONSIDERING AI INVENTORSHIP IN THE U.S. AI inventorship has not been recognized in the U.S. despite a dramatic increase in the development and use of AI technologies. In 2017, an economic study showed that 550 start-ups using AI as a core part of their products raised $5 billion in funding with 60% of that funding going into American companies.97 Moreover, the American Intellectual Property Law Association estimated the annual investments directly in AI technologies in 2017 reached $26-39 billion.98 Alongside this investment, the employment market for deep learning researchers has boomed with some researchers obtained through mergers and acquisitions being valued at nearly $10 million.99 AI commercialization is expected to reach $190 billion by 2025.100 While investment in AI has dramatically increased, the USPTO has not been receiving a similar increase in applications claiming computers as the inventor.101 This suggests that applicants are choosing not to disclose the AI in the inventive process.102 This trend of obscuring AI involvement in the inventive process highlights the legal risks of listing a non-human inventor. While the practice of listing humans who utilize inventing-AI has worked for the U.S. system so far, it fails to further incentivize the use of inventing-AI.103 For example, corporations, research institutions, and investors may be dissuaded from using inventing-AI to fully automate innovation because it amplifies the uncertainty and administrative burden of obtaining a patent on the resulting invention. By requiring a natural person to be listed as an inventor, the U.S. unnecessarily maintains a cost-inefficient status quo. Should the U.S. recognize AI inventorship, it could drastically change industries whose R&D costs have been ballooning just to maintain historical rates of useful, patentable discoveries.104 AI inventorship is a critical step in unlocking inventing-AI's potential to promote innovation within the patent landscape. Several reasons supporting AI inventorship are discussed below. II. SUPPORTING THE ECONOMIC-UTILITARIAN RATIONALE The rationale for AI inventorship is strongest under a utilitarian-economic incentive theory ("UEI") because the Constitution provides "explicit rationale" for granting patent protection to encourage innovation.105 Inventorship and the subsequent patent ownership rights are necessary to economically incentivize investment in innovation, but this must be balanced against the social cost of granting a government-sanctioned monopoly that can limit the diffusion of knowledge.106 This balancing is necessary to achieve the ultimate goal of advancing public welfare.107 A. Competitive Advantage in Innovation First, allowing AI inventorship may put the U.S. patent regime at a competitive advantage relative to its peers. In the past, the U.S. patent system gained a competitive advantage by allowing man-made organisms to be patentable subject matter.108 Similarly, allowing for AI inventorship could spur the use and development of inventing-AI. To illustrate this, the USPTO allowed the first transgenic animal, the "Harvard Mouse," to be patented in the wake of Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 47 U.S. 303 (1980), which allowed man-made organisms to be patentable subject matter.109 Biotechnology patents post-Chakrabarty were focused on whether the invention constituted patentable subject matter, rather than the morality of the invention.110 The USPTO left the ethical questions to the legislature and executive branches.111 The same "Harvard Mouse" patent was submitted to the EPO, but was contested under EPC Article 53 due to ethical concerns.112 This required the EPO Examining Division "to weigh the suffering of animals and possible risks to the environment on the one hand, and the invention's usefulness to mankind on the other."113 While the EPO ultimately granted the patent, the codified moral utility requirement opened grounds for litigation and invalidation within the EPC. The EPC's lack of legal certainty and potentially disparate applications of the moral utility doctrine placed the European patent system at a relative disadvantage to the US patent system.114 AI inventorship could give the U.S. patent system a similar innovative edge. Where other regimes hesitate to expand inventorship to inventing-AI, the USPTO could challenge the status quo. Just as it had deferred judgments of morality regarding man-made organisms, the USPTO can similarly discount mental acts as an exclusively human capability. Doing so could focus patent law on the "nature of the invention itself rather than the subjective mental processes by which an invention may have been achieved."115 Allowing AI inventorship would remove the legal uncertainty surrounding the validity of inventing-AI created patents, thus incentivizing an underutilized avenue to generate innovative patents. For example, the USPTO has seen increases in recent years in the number of first and second AI-related patent filings due to the large community of AI inventors in the U.S.116 and allowing for AI inventorship could further fuel this trend.

The United States faces many threats to our National Security. These threats include continuing wars with extremist elements such as ISIS and potential wars with rogue state North Korea or regional nuclear power Iran. The heated economic and diplomatic competition with Russia and a surging China could spiral out of control. Concurrently, we face threats to our future security posed by growing civil strife, famine, and refugee and migration challenges which create incubators for extremist and anti-American government factions. Our response cannot be one dimensional but instead must be a nuanced and comprehensive National Security Strategy combining all elements of National Power including a Food Security Strategy.

An American Food Security Strategy is an imperative factor in reducing the multiple threats impacting our National wellbeing. Recent history has shown that reliable food supplies and stable prices produce more stable and secure countries. Conversely, food insecurity, particularly in poorer countries, can lead to instability, unrest, and violence.

Intellectual property (IP) contributes enormously to our national and state economies. Dozens of industries across our economy rely on the adequate enforcement of their patents, trademarks, and copyrights, while consumers use IP to ensure they are purchasing safe, guaranteed products. We believe IP rights are worth protecting, both domestically and abroad. This is why:

Intellectual Property Creates and Supports High-Paying Jobs