Can You Patent an AI Algorithm?

I am not a lawyer, so treat this as an inventor's view rather than legal advice. But having been through the process, I can explain the distinction that trips most people up.

You cannot patent an idea or a formula

Abstract ideas, mathematical formulas, and pure algorithms are generally not patentable on their own. A neural network architecture in the abstract, a clever loss function, a statistical method, these are treated as building blocks that belong to everyone. If patents covered the math, progress would grind to a halt, and the law is built to avoid that.

So if your pitch is "I invented a better algorithm," that alone is usually not a patent. It might be a trade secret, or a research contribution, but the bare algorithm is hard to claim.

You can patent a specific application of it

What you can protect is a concrete, novel, and non-obvious system or method that applies those building blocks to solve a real problem in a particular way. Not "machine learning for images," but a specific pipeline, with specific steps, that does something new and useful that was not obvious before.

That difference is exactly why our own work is described as a system rather than a model. It is not a claim on AI for medicine in the abstract. It is a particular way of focusing on the regions of a scan that matter, representing them in a privacy-preserving form, learning from expert feedback, and keeping the whole thing secure and auditable. You can read what that means on the patents page and in what the patent actually does.

Why the framing matters

When you draft claims, you are constantly pushed away from the abstract and toward the concrete and measurable. I learned this the hard way through the office action process, where vague language gets rejected and specific, defined language survives. That is not bureaucratic fussiness. It is the system forcing you to prove you invented a real thing, not just described a wish.

So, can you patent an AI algorithm? Not the algorithm. But the specific machine you built around it, the one that solves a concrete problem in a way nobody did before, that is exactly what the patent system is for.