The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to review a closely watched case about AI-generated art copyright, leaving intact lower-court rulings that reaffirm a central principle of U.S. copyright law: authorship requires a human creator.
The case, Thaler v. Perlmutter, began when computer scientist Stephen Thaler attempted to register copyright for an image titled A Recent Entrance to Paradise. Thaler stated that the work was produced autonomously by his artificial intelligence system, DABUS, without human involvement. The U.S. Copyright Office rejected the application, concluding that copyright protection applies only to works created by human authors.
Thaler challenged that decision in federal court. In 2023, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia upheld the Copyright Office’s determination that the Copyright Act requires human authorship. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit later affirmed the ruling. In March 2026, the Supreme Court declined to hear Thaler’s appeal, allowing those decisions to stand.
The outcome reinforces guidance the Copyright Office has issued in recent years: generative AI systems can be used within creative workflows, but works produced entirely without human creative input are not eligible for copyright protection. The ruling does not address another major legal question surrounding generative media—whether AI systems can legally train on copyrighted artworks. That issue is currently being tested in several federal lawsuits involving artists, image libraries, and developers of generative AI systems.
