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But Who Owns the Invention? # AI Is Transforming South African Mining. But Who Owns the Invention? Patrick O'Brien - 2 November 2026 South Africa’s mining industry is at a precipice. As mines pursue greater depths, they face ageing infrastructure, skills shortages and mounting pressure to improve safety. Sustainability and productivity are forcing companies to rethink how they operate. In this environment, artificial intelligence (AI) is already influencing how decisions are made, how risks are managed and how value is created. As AI reshapes the sector, however, a harder question is emerging, one that has little to do with engineering and everything to do with law: when a mining company, a technology provider and a team of engineers collaborate to develop a new AI-enabled system, who owns the resulting invention? The pace of transformation is difficult to overstate. PwC and the Minerals Council of South Africa’s 2026 Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) in Mining study found that mining leaders consistently pointed to practical, high-value use cases where AI is already delivering impact: predictive maintenance to reduce unplanned downtime, real-time monitoring of mine conditions to improve safety, faster geological analysis and improvements in energy use. Accenture research tells a complementary story. Mining companies are leveraging digital twins, IIoT, and AI to drive efficiency, optimise operations and enhance sustainability across the value chain. Predictive analytics and machine learning are revolutionising mineral discovery, reducing costs, accelerating exploration and improving resource estimation accuracy. Fittingly, the critical materials required for the 4IR are themselves obtained from the mining industry: lithium for batteries, copper for electrification, rare earth elements for data storage media, and silicon for processors and memory units. It would therefore come as no surprise that technology investments in mining are expected to increase by more than 25% by the end of 2026, as demand for these minerals continues to surge. ## AI in Mining: Identifying the inventors Against this backdrop, consider a scenario that is increasingly common. A South African [mining](https://spoor.com/sector/mining-and-resources/) house engages a technology provider to develop an AI-driven predictive maintenance system for its underground fleet. The technology company contributes its proprietary machine-learning algorithms; the mining company contributes operational data from years of equipment use; and the mining engineers, working daily alongside the AI developers, contribute expertise that allows the system to be trained, tested and optimised. Together, they produce an innovation that no one could have created alone. The question then arises: who is the inventor, and who has the right to apply for a patent in respect of the invention? The right to apply for a patent vests with the inventors. Incorrectly identifying the inventor(s) calls into question who legally has rights to the invention, and who is entitled to apply for patent protection. In South Africa and the United Kingdom, the inventorship test is twofold: identify the inventive concept, and then identify who devised it. The Australian courts have provided helpful factors to consider when determining inventorship, including whether a person’s contribution had a “material effect” on the invention, whether the contribution was to the “conception of the solution” to a problem, and whether the invention would have materialised *but for* that contribution. The United States applies a similar two-step inquiry, focusing on conception of the idea and reduction to practice, with the critical determination turning on the “claimed” invention. Nuanced distinctions across jurisdictions mean that inventorship in a multi-party, multinational collaborations typical of mining-technology relationships requires careful assessment. In our scenario, not every participant is automatically an inventor. Supervisors or project leaders are not inventors merely by virtue of their authority. Laboratory technicians or software developers, who simply carry out instructions without significant changes, are not inventors. Neither is a person who merely writes up results or co-authors a paper. It is also important to remember that the computer program itself is not an invention in terms of patent law, but rather the system or method which is implemented, if it produces a technical effect. The inventive concept must be identified, as a whole, from the body of the specification and the claims, and contributions should be analysed to identify every person who performed the mental act of definitively forming that concept so that it may be applied in practice with ordinary skill. In a collaboration between mining engineers and AI developers, the line between conception and mere execution is often blurred, and rigorous documentation of each party’s contribution is essential. ***RELATED: [Patent Prosecution Highway: Where Does South Africa Fit In?](https://spoor.com/patent-prosecution-highway-where-does-south-africa-fit-in/)*** ## IP resulting from AI Then there is the AI itself. South Africa was the first country to grant a patent citing an AI as the inventor. However, South African courts have not had an opportunity to assess the validity of this decision. The position in Australia, the UK, the EU and the US is clear: an inventor must be a natural person. The US Patent Office has published guidelines explicitly stating that the use of an AI in devising an invention does not automatically disqualify patentability, provided there is a human who fulfils the requirement of being an inventor. Inventions created entirely by AI, however, are not patentable. Similar principles apply in Australia and the UK, which means that human inventors should always be cited when applying for a patent in these countries. The issue is particularly relevant in the mining industry today. The CEOs of the world’s leading AI companies are themselves warning of the pace at which AI capability is advancing. In September 2026, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei called for an immediate slowdown in frontier AI development, cautioning that AI systems are advancing faster than researchers’ ability to understand and control them. OpenAI’s Sam Altman endorsed the call, as did Elon Musk and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis. Amodei and Musk have suggested that human-level AI could arrive as early as 2026 or 2027. If that prediction proves accurate, even in part, the question of whether an AI system can be an inventor will no longer be an academic curiosity – it could be the central challenge of patent law. Complex inventorship and ownership disputes could arise as AI plays an increasingly creative, rather than merely operational, role in conceiving mining innovations. When an AI system trained on a mining company’s proprietary geological data proposes a novel drilling methodology that an engineer then refines, the question of who devised the inventive concept becomes considerably harder to answer. ## Practical implications for mining businesses For the mining industry, the practical implications are immediate. Mining companies, technology providers and their engineers must think proactively about documenting inventorship, structuring IP ownership in their joint venture agreements, and ensuring that the human contributions to AI-assisted inventions are identified and recorded from the earliest stages of development. Given the investment in obtaining a granted patent, parties should ensure that it is valid and enforceable, and that contractual arrangements around assignments, licences and inventorship are certain, so that disputes do not arise. AI will not transform South African mining on its own. As the PwC study concluded, technology alone will not do it – people, culture and disciplined execution will. The same is true for the intellectual property that emerges from that transformation. The innovation may be powered by algorithms, but its ownership will be determined by people, by contracts and by laws that are still catching up.