Singapore opens AI copyright and patent consultation

Singapore’s Ministry of Law and the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore opened a public consultation on 26 August on AI’s impact on copyrights and patents. The exercise asks whether copyrighted works can legally be used to train AI models, how copyright owners should be protected if they are, and how existing principles on inventions should apply when AI is used in the invention process. The launch was announced by Minister for Law Edwin Tong at the Global Forum on Intellectual Property during Singapore IP Week at Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre. The consultation details are available online, and the government is inviting submissions before the October deadline. Tong said the issue is increasingly likely to arise because AI is being used more widely as a creative tool, is more powerful in how it can be used, and needs more content to be trained on. He also said the authenticity of creation is increasingly being questioned. He said courts and IP offices around the world broadly agree that an author must be a human being, but asked where the line should be drawn when human prompters make decisions that show sufficient creativity. In his view, promoting innovation should not stifle it, but creators’ rights need careful consideration and balancing. Tong said it is not good in the long term if creative works can be used at large scale by AI without a framework that considers how the works were created. He said the government wants to examine the issue with stakeholders, especially those in creative industries, and that a solution may involve more technical measures, while also taking account of less well-resourced rights holders. The consultation comes against a global flurry of copyright lawsuits over AI training. The article says rights holders have accused technology companies of using books, news articles, images and music to train AI without permission or payment, and that overseas courts have reached different conclusions depending on the facts of each case. In one US example, a judge ordered Anthropic to pay authors US$1.5 billion for infringing copyrights after the company used millions of pirated e-books to train its AI without consent or payment. The same judge found no infringement when Anthropic trained its system by scanning pages from old physical books it had bought, later destroyed and recycled, treating that destructive scanning as transformative fair use. The patent side of the consultation has its own background. Marks-Clerk says IPOS issued supplemental guidance in October 2024 for AI-related patent applications, and that Singapore’s Patents Act does not define excluded patentable subject matter, so examination relies on IPOS guidance. The guidance asks whether the actual contribution falls solely within non-patentable subject matter; if it does, the claim is not treated as an invention. That guidance says a claim whose actual contribution solves a specific problem is not necessarily just a mathematical method. Marks-Clerk gives one example in which a method for optimising execution times by reducing the size of a trained neural network was treated as defining an invention, while a method of extending a neural network was not. CEPA has separately said Singapore’s copyright rules already allow use “for the purposes of computational data analysis” under Section 244, but that the limits of the exception have not yet been tested in litigation. Tong also announced other IP-related initiatives, including guidelines on valuing intangible assets developed by the Institute of Valuers and Appraisers Singapore with support from the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority, IPOS and industry partners. Consultation details are available at go.gov.sg/ai-ip2026, and submissions are due by 5pm on 22 October.