On March 3, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to grant certiorari in the case brought by Stephen Thaler against Shira Perlmutter, head of the United States Copyright Office.
This procedural decision brings to a close—at least for the time being—one of the most significant legal challenges concerning the copyright protection of works generated entirely by artificial intelligence. By refusing to review the case, the Supreme Court leaves in place the judgment of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which held that a work produced without human creative involvement cannot qualify for copyright protection under U.S. law.
Although the Court did not address the merits of the dispute, the case has become a landmark reference in the ongoing debate on the legal status of AI-generated creations.
The dispute originates from a strategy pursued by Stephen Thaler, an American researcher and entrepreneur in the field of artificial intelligence. Thaler developed an AI system known as the “Creativity Machine,” designed to autonomously generate visual compositions.
In 2019, Thaler filed a copyright registration application with the Copyright Office for an image entitled A Recent Entrance to Paradise. What made the application unusual was that Thaler expressly identified the artificial intelligence system as the author of the work, while describing himself merely as the owner of the machine that generated it.
The Copyright Office rejected the application on the ground that U.S. copyright law requires human authorship. That administrative decision was subsequently upheld by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and later affirmed by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
In its reasoning, the appellate court emphasized that several provisions of the U.S. Copyright Act presuppose the existence of a human author. For example, the duration of copyright protection is calculated with reference to the author’s life, and various statutory provisions relating to ownership, inheritance, and employment relationships are structured around the concept of a natural person as author. In the absence of human creative input, the court concluded that copyright protection could not arise.
Thaler petitioned the Supreme Court to review the case, arguing that nothing in the Copyright Act explicitly limits authorship to human beings. In his view, denying protection to works generated by artificial intelligence would be inconsistent with the constitutional objective of copyright, which is to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.
The Supreme Court, however, declined to grant certiorari. As is customary in such circumstances, the Court did not provide any reasoning for its decision. While the denial of certiorari does not constitute a substantive endorsement of the lower court’s analysis, it effectively leaves the appellate judgment intact.
As a result, the legal position in the United States remains clear: a work generated entirely by an artificial intelligence system, without identifiable human creative contribution, is not eligible for copyright protection.
This position is consistent with the longstanding practice of the Copyright Office, which accepts copyright protection for works that involve meaningful human creative input but rejects protection for works generated autonomously by AI systems.
The Thaler v. Perlmutter litigation highlights a structural feature of modern copyright law: its foundation on the notion of human authorship. Historically, copyright protection has been justified by the idea that a work reflects the personal intellectual creation of an individual author.
The approach adopted by U.S. courts is broadly aligned with the principles developed in European copyright law. Under the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union, copyright protection requires that a work constitute the “author’s own intellectual creation,” a formulation that likewise presupposes human creative activity.
The practical implication of this approach is that works generated entirely by artificial intelligence may fall outside the scope of copyright protection and therefore enter the public domain immediately. By contrast, works created with the assistance of AI—where a human author exercises creative choices in selecting, arranging, or modifying the generated output—may still qualify for protection.
By declining to hear the Thaler case, the Supreme Court has effectively left the question to the U.S. legislature. Should a specific legal regime for AI-generated works be considered desirable, it will ultimately fall to Congress to determine its contours.
Until such legislative developments occur, one principle remains firmly established on both sides of the Atlantic: copyright law continues to rest on a central requirement—the existence of identifiable human creativity.
