In decisions J 8/20 and J 9/20, the Legal Board of Appeal confirmed the refusal of European patent applications designating an artificial intelligence, called DABUS, as inventor. The applicant (a natural person domiciled in Missouri, USA) declared that the inventions had been created autonomously by DABUS (which is actually an acronym for “Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience”). Regardless of the patentability question of the subject-matter of these applications, the Legal Board of Appeal confirmed that an artificial intelligence machine, which does not have legal capacity, could not be designated as inventor. In the first instance decisions, the...