Emotional Perception AI Ltd v Comptroller General of Patents [2026] UKSC 3: How the Supreme Court Rewrote the Rules on AI Patents

For twenty years, a UK patent applicant whose invention ran on a computer faced a particular kind of frustration. It was not enough to show that the invention was new, clever, or commercially valuable. The applicant first had to survive a threshold test that had nothing to do with those qualities. Under the Aerotel framework, the courts asked a preliminary question that tripped up a significant number of genuinely novel software and artificial intelligence inventions before they could even be assessed on their merits. In February 2026, the UK Supreme Court looked at that framework, found it logically flawed, and...

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