European Patent Office (EPO) Illegally Turning to Slop Behind Closed Doors, Staff Objects to This Hidden Catastrophe

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 25, 2025,
updated Mar 25, 2025

This is what happens when Europe's second-largest institution gets stacked or stuffed with white-collar criminals who lack any grasp of science and lack respect for truth/facts

Slop - or sometimes LLM slop (basically nonsense spewed out by models that lack actual comprehension of both inputs and outputs) - is practically worthless hype and a bubble, just like many that came before it and continue to re-emerge [1, 2] to reinvigorate and deceive. Remember 4IR? Or IOT/IoT? How about "Metaverse"?

Nowadays almost everything that MBAs touch is being re-labeled "hey hi" (AI). It's not new, so they use terms and redundant adjectives like "advanced" or "generative" or "agentic" or "superintelligent" "AI". They have marketing slogans with terms like "era" or "arms race". There's hardly any use case for it... to date, except gimmicks or harder-to-detect plagiarism. To give a new example of what we're dealing with, yesterday we said that Planet Ubuntu (or Ubuntu Planet) is LLM slop because it aggregates Serial Sloppers or bots. Today too we saw another example of it, again with the same culprit in Planet Ubuntu (or Ubuntu Planet):

Slop as usual.

Now, imagine dealing with serious legal issues (with a lot of money at stake) using slop. What sane person would do this? Probably these corrupt people who do illegal things behind back doors and closed doors. They conspire to break the law and/or harm people. Such people must never be in positions of power at all.

Thankfully, the illegal EPO policy ("Internal use only") has been leaked:

Hiding one's illegalities behind a veil of secrecy might be expected from rogue and illegal (unconstitutional) pseudo-agencies like "DOGE" [sic]. The EPO is no better, except this is happening in Europe and it almost directly discredits the EU.

Thankfully the EPO's Central Staff Committee has already analysed it and politely explained what's happening here. To quote:

Dear Colleagues,

Staff of the EPO and their representation discovered in the news item of 5 March 2025 that the EPO has adopted an AI policy. The document was adopted without consultation of any stakeholder and has far-reaching consequences which should have been subject to an open debate.

First, the EPO AI policy is not bound by international texts such as the Council of Europe Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights, Democracy, and the Rule of Law of 17 May 2024, and the EU AI Act.

Second, the EPO AI policy lacks boundary between AI "assistance" and "decision-making". While the policy presents as key principle a “human-centric approach” promising that “final decisions will be taken by humans at the EPO”, the document nevertheless advocates the implementation of AI in pre-search, machine translation, pre-classification, re-classification and “to potentially automate considerable parts of the search” [and] "to automate repetitive tasks, leading to increased efficiency and productivity in various areas ? including the examination process”.

In the already implemented AI-based automatic closing of circulation of patent applications for the purpose of classification, the classification decision is done without the final input of the relevant classifiers and gérants in the field who are simply supplanted by AI.

Third, the EPO AI policy acknowledges that “the automation of tasks through AI may lead to job displacement and the need for reskilling programmes to support affected individuals” and hence directly acknowledges an impact on working conditions. Further far-reaching changes on adverse decision-making on employee rights and benefits are foreseen via AI systems which are classified as high-risk.

In this open letter, we request that the present EPO AI policy is submitted to an open and transparent debate with all stakeholders and to statutory consultation.

Here's the full open letter as GemText, HTML, and plain text:

European Patent Office
80298 Munich
Germany

Central Staff Committee
Comité central du personnel
Zentraler Personalausschuss

centralSTCOM@epo.org

Reference: sc25022cl

Date: 21/03/2025

European Patent Office | 80298 MUNICH | GERMANY

To:
Mr António Campinos
(President of the EPO)

By email:
president@epo.org

OPEN LETTER

EPO AI policy: A policy requiring open debate and consultation of stakeholders

Dear Mr President,

Staff of the EPO and their representation discovered in the news item¹ of 5 March 2025 that the EPO has adopted an AI policy². The document was adopted without consultation of the staff representation, without any decision from the Administration Council and is classified for “internal use only”, thereby suggesting that there is no intent to make it available to the public. This policy has far-reaching consequences which should have been subject to an open debate.

The EPO AI policy is not bound by international texts
First, the policy states that the EPO just takes note of initiatives such as the Council of Europe Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights, Democracy, and the Rule of Law of 17 May 2024, and the EU AI Act. However, further into the document, the EPO hides behind its administrative autonomy under Article 4(1) EPC to consider these texts as not legally binding³. We note that the same approach was adopted by the EPO to argue that it was not bound by the European Convention on Human Rights. This led our Organisation to several breaches of the right to freedom of association (incl. the right to strike

_______

¹ “New EPO AI Policy adopted”, News item of 5 March 2025

² EPO AI Policy: Policy on the use of artificial intelligence systems

³ page 5, par. b

---

and the right to freedom of communication). We believe our organisation should take utmost care to learn from the past and explicitly recognise international texts, and in particular when it comes to AI.⁴

Lack of boundary between “assistance” and “decision-making”
Second, the policy presents as key principle a “human-centric approach”⁵ defined as “the combination of human + AI providing better result in terms of quality and efficiency than either of them alone” while “final decisions will be taken by humans at the EPO”. The document also recognises that AI “may even supplant decision-making processes”⁶ and “[i]n public administration this may pose certain legal questions relating to due process”. However, the document advocates the implementation of AI in pre-search, machine translation, pre-classification, re-classification⁷ and “to potentially automate considerable parts of the search” [and] "to automate repetitive tasks, leading to increased efficiency and productivity in various areas ‒ including the examination process”⁸.

There is already an area where AI has started to supplant EPO officials and that is for the classification of patent applications. The reason provided is consistency⁹ : “AI can ensure consistent practice and administration, e.g. by categorising applications into relevant classes and subclasses, improving the accuracy and consistency of patent classification.” In practice since June 2024, the EPO has put in place an AI-based automatic closing of circulation of patent applications. Allocated classes by third-parties can be marked by the AI as final without any confirmation from classifiers and gérants in the relevant fields. The classification decision is done without the final input of the relevant experts who are simply supplanted by AI but remain, according to this policy¹⁰, subject to “principles and rules relating to the responsibility and accountability of EPO employees laid down in the Service Regulations and other internal rules”. The feedback we gathered from classifiers and gérants is for the vast majority negative about the quality of the AI-based automated classification when currently 46.7% of the classification tasks are automated. We are deeply concerned that the Office wants to continue to leverage AI in classification under these conditions and reach by 2028¹¹ a target proportion of 90% of classification tasks that no longer require human intellectual classification.

______

⁴ page 5, paragraph b

⁵ page 2, last paragraph

⁶ page 6, section C. 1. paragraph 1

⁷ page 3, paragraph 2

⁸ page 3, section 2. bullets 1 and 5 bullet

⁹ page 3, section 2. bullet 4

¹⁰ page 9, section 4. paragraph 3

¹¹ Strategic Plan 2028 Progress Dashboard

---

Impact on working conditions
Third, the policy acknowledges that “the automation of tasks through AI may lead to job displacement and the need for reskilling programmes to support affected individuals” and hence directly acknowledges an impact on working conditions. Further far-reaching changes on adverse decision-making on employee rights and benefits are foreseen via AI systems which are classified as high-risk. They are defined as such if they are intended to be used¹²:

• “to evaluate the eligibility of individuals for essential benefits and services, including coverage under healthcare insurance provided or paid by the EPO, as well as to grant, reduce, revoke, or reclaim such benefits”

• “for assessing the likelihood that an individual will engage in misconduct not solely based on the profiling of individuals as referred to in Article 3(1)(d) EPO DPR or to assess personality traits and characteristics or past behaviour of individuals or groups”

• “for the profiling of individuals as referred to in Article 3(1)(d) EPO DPR in the course of the detection or investigation of misconduct”

While such AI systems are classified as high-risk, their implementation or use is nevertheless considered if individual and overall residual risks “are deemed acceptable” and provided that AI is used for its intended purpose and with the promise that they will be trained, tested and validated with the “data sets that meet the highest quality criteria and are subject to appropriate data governance and management practices”¹³. This is clearly insufficient to reassure staff.

The EPO AI policy has triggered many discussions among concerned EPO staff.

We request that the present EPO AI policy is submitted to an open and transparent debate with all stakeholders and to statutory consultation.

Sincerely yours,

Derek Kelly
Chairman of the Central Staff Committee

______

¹² page 12

¹³ page 13

The only room/capacity for slop at the EPO should be none, zero. People don't pay for bots to pretend to do work, the EPC didn't see member states reconvening on the matter.

Benoît Battistelli used to ride all sort of buzzwords (vague mumbo-jumbo for voodoo science) to justify granting loads of European software patents - i.e. patents which are both illegal and undesirable. António Campinos has done the same with "blockchain" hype and now "hey hi". Since Campinos has no background in science, name-dropping buzzwords is the best he can ever do. We did some video rebuttals to his laughable name-dropping. Is this clown the best Europe has to offer in its biggest patent office? Highly concerning!

The EPO's crises deepens the financial crisis in Europe and contaminates the EU with corruption. Who stands to gain from all this and at whose expense? █