Artificial intelligence and patents in Brazil: Overview on patentability and comparative study on patent filings

Innovations related to artificial intelligence (AI) can impact many technological fields and gather attention of several sectors from industry. Brazil is a developing country with a large territory and consumer market, attracting investment from foreign companies, including AI technologies. In the present work, we carry out a review of the Brazilian IP Law, Guidelines and Resolutions regarding patentability of AI inventions in Brazil, and also perform comparative analyses with the guidelines from the EPO and USPTO. Then, patent searches are carried out to analyze filing indicators of patent applications for AI inventions, wherein it is possible to verify that most of the filing applicants in Brazil are foreign companies, mainly from the US. Brazilian entities, which rank second overall in filing for patent applications in Brazil, do not even appear among the main applicants for AI inventions. We conclude that Brazil is not a competitive country in the production of patents related to AI, and it is important for Brazil to establish some degree of legal certainty regarding patent protection for AI inventions and disseminate knowledge about protecting such inventions by patents, so that inventors opt to disclose their AI inventions instead of keeping them as a trade secret. Therefore, more and more sectors of society might benefit from innovations arising from AI.