In February 2026, the UK Supreme Court held that it is possible to obtain a UK patent for a system which uses an artificial neural network (ANN) because it is not, for the purposes of applicable UK law, excluded from registration as a “program for a computer”.
An ANN is a model inspired by the human brain that can engage in machine learning. It can be trained to perform a task to improve the quality of its performance by an iterative process of adjustment, which involves comparing outputs generated by the ANN with target outputs that have been independently identified.
The commercial purpose of the claimed invention is to be provide more quickly and accurately, and to make better recommendations than anything else currently available. That claim was not adjudicated by the court.
What the court did decide was that an ANN is not a “program for a computer”. Although the legislation uses the term “computer”, the term cannot be confined to conventional digital computers or a particular technology which happens to be prevalent. That would exclude from the legislation description devices such as old-fashioned analogue computers and the quantum computers now being developed. The term “program” should be interpreted correspondingly to mean a set of instructions capable of being followed by a computer of any kind, to produce desired manipulations of data. An ANN can be implemented on a variety of different types of hardware, and this fact demonstrates that an ANN is not itself a type of hardware. The ANN is a set of instructions to manipulate data in a particular way to produce a desired result. It is therefore not a “program for a computer within the meaning of the law”.
The wording of the UK/EU law is not the same as South African law in this context and the case is not directly relevant. It demonstrates how the courts up to the highest level are now grappling with the world of AI, practically in this case.