The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up a legal matter concerning generative artificial intelligence: whether creations entirely produced by a machine can be granted copyright protection. The Justices dismissed the appeal, thereby upholding the rulings of the lower courts, which mandate the necessary involvement of a human in the creation of a work.
According to Reuters, the case involved American programmer Stephen Thaler, who attempted to secure copyright for an image generated by his AI system, DABUS.
The artwork, titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” was created without any human input. It depicts railroad tracks receding into a luminous portal surrounded by abstract vegetative forms. Thaler contended that the AI itself was the author and should be recognized as the rights holder.
He submitted his initial registration application back in 2018. In 2022, the U.S. Copyright Office rejected it, stating that copyright protection applies only to works created by human beings.
In 2023, a federal court in Washington endorsed this view, labeling human authorship as a “fundamental requirement of the law.” In 2025, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed this decision. Following this, Thaler brought his case before the Supreme Court. However, the Justices opted not to intervene.
The administration of Joe Biden also opposed reviewing the regulations. In official filings, the government stipulated that “the provisions of copyright law unequivocally interpret the term ‘author’ as a human being, not a machine.”
This ruling represents another setback for Thaler. Previously, he had sought to have AI recognized as an inventor in patent applications but was denied by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The Supreme Court at that time also refused to hear his petition.
Consequently, within U.S. intellectual property law, both copyrights and patents are exclusively vested in people. The Copyright Office maintains a similar stance in cases involving image generators like Midjourney. In several instances, the agency refused registration for works where the human contribution was deemed insufficient.
In contrast to these scenarios, Thaler insisted on the complete absence of human involvement in the work’s genesis. This distinction currently forms the basis of the legal ambiguity surrounding AI: tools that assist humans may receive protection, but completely autonomous systems do not.
Experts suggest that potential shifts may only arise through the U.S. Congress or in the context of future cases presenting different facts. For now, the position of American courts remains steadfast: copyright safeguards human creativity, not the independent operation of algorithms.
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