Singapore IPOS Consults on UKSC Emotional Perception AI Patent Decision

In brief

The Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) has launched a feedback exercise seeking IP practitioners' views on the recent decision of the UK Supreme Court in Emotional Perception AI Limited v Comptroller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks [2026] UKSC 3 (“Emotional Perception”).

In Emotional Perception, the UK Supreme Court held that inventions involving artificial neural networks (ANNs) may be patentable provided they demonstrate a technical character, and in doing so departed from the long-standing Aerotel approach in the UK in favour of the "any hardware" approach applied by the European Patent Office (EPO).

IPOS is seeking feedback on whether Emotional Perception is relevant to Singapore patent practice; whether it brings greater clarity on patentable subject matter and its relationship with inventive step; and what practical challenges its approach may create for patent applicants and practitioners, including how such challenges could be addressed.

The feedback exercise runs from 17 April 2026 to 14 May 2026. Feedback may be submitted here.

In more detail

On 17 April 2026, IPOS launched a feedback exercise inviting IP practitioners to share their views on the relevance of Emotional Perception to the development of patent practice in Singapore.

In a judgment delivered on 11 February 2026, the UK Supreme Court in Emotional Perception departed from the approach in Aerotel Ltd v Telco Holdings Ltd [2006] EWCA Civ 1371; [2007] RPC 7 (“Aerotel”) that had governed UK patent eligibility for nearly two decades, and aligned the UK position more closely with the "any hardware" approach applied by the EPO.

Under the previous approach in Aerotel, the Court of Appeal set out a four-step structured approach to be followed in applying Article 52(2)(c) of the European Patent Convention (EPC). The central question was whether the invention as defined in the claim for a patent makes a novel technical contribution to the known art, with the rider that subject matter which falls within an exclusion does not count for this purpose.

In Emotional Perception, the UK Supreme Court endorsed the first six “Duns principles” as affirmed in G1/19 [2021] EPOR 30 (G1/19) and articulated the following three‑stage framework for assessing the patentability of computer‑implemented inventions:

1. Invention stage: Determine whether the claimed subject matter qualifies as an “invention” using the “any hardware” approach. A claim referring to technical means such as a computer, storage medium, or other hardware will generally clear the exclusion hurdle and not be regarded as a computer program “as such”.
2. Intermediate step: Identify which features of the claim contribute to the technical character of the invention, assessed by viewing the invention as a whole. Features that do not contribute to technical character are to be disregarded in the subsequent novelty and inventive step analysis.
3. Patentability assessment: Assess industrial applicability, novelty and inventive step based only on those contributing features. The Supreme Court declined to provide further guidance on how this interacts with the UK’s existing Pozzoli approach to inventive step.

Applying this framework, the Court held that while ANNs are “programs for computers”, they are not programs “as such” where the claims involve technical means. Because the claims in Emotional Perception expressly referred to hardware components including a database, communications network and user device, they satisfied the “any hardware” test. The refusal on excluded subject matter grounds was overturned, and the application was remitted for substantive examination.

IPOS is seeking feedback on:

1. Whether Emotional Perception is relevant to Singapore patent practice, and which aspects are most pertinent.
2. Whether the decision provides clarity and certainty on patentable subject matter and inventive step.
3. The issues or challenges the approach may create for applicants and practitioners, and how these could be addressed.
     

Key takeaways

This consultation signals IPOS’s openness to reassessing how computer‑implemented and AI‑related inventions are treated under Singapore patent law. While Emotional Perception is not binding in Singapore, it reflects a clear alignment between UK and EPO jurisprudence that may influence future IPOS guidance.

For practitioners, the decision highlights a clearer conceptual separation between eligibility and inventiveness. If IPOS were to move closer to an “any hardware” analysis, applicants may face a lower hurdle at the subject‑matter eligibility stage, with more cases progressing to substantive examination and greater scrutiny shifted to inventive step. This places renewed importance on how technical contribution is framed, identified, and defended during prosecution.

In drafting, it is important not to rely on generic hardware references. Applications should tie model features to a technical effect which the specification drafting should support, for example, latency, robustness, resource optimisation, signal processing, improved sensor performance, security, and reduced compute.

The Emotional Perception decision also leaves open how any new intermediate step would interact with Singapore’s current inventive step analysis. Stakeholder feedback may therefore shape not only eligibility thresholds, but also how rigorously technical contribution is assessed downstream.

Businesses developing machine‑learning systems, recommendation engines, data‑driven analytics, or decision‑support tools should consider whether current Singapore practice adequately reflects commercial and technical realities, or whether greater alignment with the EPO and UK post‑Emotional Perception would improve certainty and predictability.

For AI product companies, it is recommended to start engineering artefacts that show technical effect, for example, benchmarks, architecture decisions, compute/memory reductions, network efficiency, hardware integration. These can later support inventive step arguments if eligibility becomes easier but technical contribution becomes stricter.

This consultation is an opportunity to engage IPOS on where the balance should be struck between accessibility, certainty and examination rigour for AI‑enabled inventions in Singapore.

Feedback must be submitted here by 14 May 2026.

For further information and to discuss what this development might mean for you, please get in touch with your usual Baker McKenzie contact.

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