Regulating AI-Generated Inventions in Tanzania: A Comparative Analysis of BRELA and South Africa’s CIPC

Artificial intelligence systems now produce technical solutions with little or no human contribution to the inventive step, and the DABUS applications filed by Dr Stephen Thaler have tested whether patent law can accommodate an inventor that is not a person. Courts and offices in the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe, Australia and Germany have refused, while South Africa’s Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) published the grant of a patent naming DABUS as inventor in July 2021. This article asks whether Tanzania’s Business Registrations and Licensing Agency (BRELA) could follow that example under the Patents (Registration) Act, Cap 217, and, if not, what reform is required. Using doctrinal analysis and functional comparison, it finds that the two statutes are closer than is usually assumed: neither defines ‘inventor’, and both require an applicant who is not the inventor to show a right derived from the inventor. The decisive difference is administrative. The South African grant followed a formalities-only check in which, on the published record, the applicant’s entitlement was not tested, leaving validity to revocation proceedings. Section 25(7) and (8) of Cap 217, by contrast, require the Registrar to examine every request for compliance with section 18(3) and (4) and to reject one that is not corrected. An application naming DABUS would therefore fail at the formal stage, and one naming a human who did not devise the invention would be open to invalidation under section 64(2)(d). BRELA cannot reproduce the CIPC outcome by discretion. The article recommends, in order of priority, statements of practice on AI-assisted inventions, revised forms, a statutory definition of inventor and, after regional consultation through ARIPO and the East African Community, a deliberate legislative choice on whether AI-generated inventions should be protected.