Reintroduced eligibility bill would rescue a mathematical formula that cannot practically run without a machine

2025-05-01Legislation

Patent Eligibility Restoration Act of 2025, S. 1546, 119th Cong., introduced May 1, 2025 by Senators Tillis and Coons; H.R. 3152, 119th Cong., introduced May 1, 2025 by Representatives Kiley and Peters

Senators Tillis and Coons reintroduced the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act as S. 1546, and Representatives Kiley and Peters introduced a companion, H.R. 3152. The bill's findings state that all judicial exceptions to patent eligibility are eliminated. New Section 101(b)(1) of Title 35 of the United States Code would exclude, if claimed as such, "[a] mathematical formula that is not part of a claimed invention in a category described in subsection (a)"; a process that is "substantially economic, financial, business, social, cultural, or artistic, even though at least 1 step in the process refers to a machine or manufacture"; a mental process performed solely in the human mind; a process occurring in nature independent of human activity; and unmodified human genes and natural materials. New Section 101(b)(2)(A) provides that for the mathematical formula and economic process exclusions, "the claimed invention shall not be excluded from eligibility for a patent if the invention cannot practically be performed without the use of a machine or manufacture." The 2023 bill, S. 2140, applied that machine condition only to the economic process exclusion. Section 101(c) would decide eligibility on the claimed invention as a whole, without disregarding any element and without regard to conventionality or to Sections 102, 103 and 112, and would let a court decide eligibility at any time.

What it changesThe change matters to machine learning more than any other line in the bill. Of the bill's listed exclusions, the one a model claim is most exposed to is the mathematical formula, because a trained network is a composition of functions, and the 2023 text left that exclusion without the machine condition. Under the 2025 text, a claim to a model's training or inference survives both exclusions if the claimed invention cannot practically be performed without a computer, whatever a court calls the underlying computation. The drafting consequence is the same under either regime: recite the computation at the scale and in the form that makes performance by a person with pencil and paper impractical, and say in the specification why, with numbers for parameters, data volume and latency, because that showing is what the condition turns on and it also answers a mental-process rejection under current law. This is the third introduction since 2022, and nothing in it is law yet; budget for prosecution under Alice.

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Burbage Law is the practice of Jon Burbage, a registered patent attorney. 342 United States patents have issued from applications he wrote; the full list is on the Patents page. More about Jon Burbage.

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