THE WORLD'S FIRST PATENT NAMING A MACHINE AS THE INVENTOR WAS GRANTED IN SOUTH AFRICA

In 2021, South Africa became the only country in the world to grant a patent listing an artificial intelligence system, not a person, as the inventor. Every other patent office and court that has looked at the same invention has said no. Here's what actually happened, and why it matters more now than it did then.

On 28 July 2021, South Africa's Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) granted patent number 2021/03242. Nothing about that is unusual, as thousands of patents are granted here every year. What made this one different is the name in the inventor field: DABUS, described in the application as an artificial intelligence system that "autonomously generated" the invention. The applicant, Dr. Stephen Thaler, had built DABUS and was asserting rights to whatever it created. No human being was named as the inventor at all.

It made headlines as a world first. It still is one, but not for the reason most coverage implied at the time.

Why South Africa said yes when nobody else did

Australia's Federal Court initially allowed it too, in a single-judge decision, before the Full Federal Court overturned that ruling on appeal. The UK Court of Appeal, and then the UK Supreme Court in December 2023, held that "inventor" under the UK Patents Act 1977 means a natural person, full stop, regardless of how the invention was actually created. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reached the same conclusion under US law in Thaler v Vidal (2022). The European Patent Office refused the equivalent European application outright. On the substantive legal question of whether a machine can be an "inventor", the rest of the world has been unanimous, and the answer has been no.

So why did South Africa grant it? Not because CIPC weighed the question and decided differently. South Africa's patent system is what's known as a depository system: unlike the UK, US or European patent offices, CIPC does not conduct substantive examination of a patent application before granting it. No assessment of novelty, no assessment of inventive step, and, critically, no meaningful interrogation of who or what the named inventor actually is. The Registrar checks that the paperwork is in the right form and grants the patent. That's it. Because the merits aren't verified by the government upon filing, the validity of a patent is only thoroughly tested if it is legally challenged in court.

The DABUS application came in through the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) national phase, which narrowed things further: PCT regulations limited what the Registrar could even ask about the inventor's identity, and a 2009 Practice Directive waived the usual proof-of-entitlement requirements in cases where the applicant and the assumed rights-holder matched on paper. 

Local commentators have gone further still, pointing out that the application itself had irregularities, including deleted language in the power of attorney that would ordinarily have confirmed how the applicant acquired rights from "the inventor," and no formal declaration of entitlement filed at all. On this reading, the grant is a story about a formalities gap the application slipped through, not a considered legal position that South African law recognises AI as capable of inventing.

Why this still matters in 2026

It matters more now than it did in 2021, for a simple reason: far more South African businesses are using AI tools in genuinely inventive ways, in product design, formulation, engineering, and R&D, and the DABUS patent is sometimes cited as if it settled the question of whether an AI-assisted or AI-generated invention can be patented here with the AI as inventor. It didn't. It's an outlier that survived because nobody was checking, not a precedent that was tested and upheld.

There's a second reason the timing matters. South Africa is in the early stages of moving away from its unexamined depository system. Since February 2026, CIPC has run a voluntary pilot allowing local applicants to opt into real substantive search and examination for the first time, and a broader Patents Bill overhauling the system further is understood to be in the pipeline. 

As examination becomes more rigorous, the kind of gap that let DABUS through gets narrower, which means anyone relying on "well, South Africa allowed it" as their answer to an AI-inventorship question is relying on a mechanism that may not exist in the same form much longer.

What this means practically

If your business uses AI as part of developing something patentable, the safe legal position is still the one every examining jurisdiction has landed on: name the human who directed, selected, or meaningfully contributed to the invention as the inventor, and treat the AI as a tool, not a co-inventor. 

The DABUS patent is a fascinating case study in how a formalities-only system can produce a result no one actually intended to test. It is not a workaround, and it is not legal certainty.