Last week, two patents filed in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the European Patent Office and the U.K.’s Intellectual Property Office caught the eye of patent attorneys and the broader tech world. It wasn’t the ideas—a food container and light display seeking patent status—that grabbed people’s attention, but instead the fact that the patent application listed a machine as an inventor.

To be sure, patent lawyers say it’s unlikely the international patent offices will allow a machine to be listed as an inventor. But they noted the filing may spark conversation regarding innovations developed by software.

“The folks that filed it [from] the university in the U.K. at a minimum are trying to provoke a discussion about how intellectual property should be treated when arguably artificial intelligence has a role in the innovation that’s been created,” said Hogan Lovells intellectual property partner Celine Crowson.

The U.K. university Crowson referenced is the University of Surrey, where Surrey law professor Ryan Abbott is one of five patent attorneys who filed the patents that listed DABUS, an artificial intelligence machine, as the inventor. The group of lawyers and DABUS developer Stephen Thaler, which calls themselves “The Artificial Inventor Project,” contend that “Inventorship should not be restricted to natural persons. A machine that would meet inventorship criteria if it were a natural person should also qualify as an inventor.”

But currently, patent offices are unlikely to change guidelines that dictate inventors are only individuals, not machines, Crowson noted. 

“I think there will be a reluctance both in Europe and the U.S. to consider the naming of a machine an artificial intelligence device as an inventor,” she said.

The Artificial Inventor Project team argues that DABUS can legally be classified as an inventor because the “conception” and “devising” of the food container and light display “is functionally automated by a machine,” the team wrote. But Crowson argued current IP laws would assign a human the inventorship title even when assisted by a machine.

“The early stage of invention is the key aspect of inventorship in intellectual property law and I think with human beings being involved that’s a principle that helps to assign ownership to human beings and not machines,” she said.

Crowson added that “When a machine is assigned with attributes or rights assigned to humans, one runs into a slippery slope about areas outside of patent law. Like liability for accidents or liability for cybersecurity breaches. It won’t work to say that just because the machine arrived [at a] decision that caused harm to people or property, that the machine should be assigned that culpability … so I think that, too, with intellectual property rights, it seems there’s likely to be unintended consequences.”

While patent regulations would need to change for machines to be listed as investors,  legislators could start a conversation about the uncharted territory and perhaps lead new guidance on the subject. 

“I think it’s a terrific development,” said Milbank IP partner Christopher Gaspar. “These filings are raising the debate of how artificial intelligence-generated innovations should be treated by the world’s leading patent offices. I think the U.S. has a terrific opportunity to take the lead on this topic.”

Still, he added that without a change in statutes, it’s unlikely a large volume of patents listing a machine as its inventor will follow DABUS because of the likelihood it will be rejected.

Although patent eligibility is the pressing issue in patent law, if the European or U.S. patent offices updated their statues to allow machine inventors, “then there will probably be a large amount of applications for these types of inventions,” he said.