With the expanding availability of artificial intelligence (AI) programs, intellectual property laws are rapidly evolving. Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court put a pause on these changes, offering clarity on the state of U.S. copyright law.
On March 2, 2026, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of Thaler v. Perlmutter, in which the D.C. Circuit Court held that copyright protection for a given work requires human authorship, meaning that entirely AI-generated works are ineligible for copyright protection. Thaler v. Perlmutter, 134 F. 4th 1039 (D.C. Cir. 2025).
The case arose when Dr. Stephen Thaler, an American computer scientist, applied with the U.S. Copyright Office for protection of a visual artwork generated by an AI program he developed. After the Copyright Office denied his application, Dr. Thaler appealed the denial with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and subsequently the D.C. Circuit, both of whom upheld the denial, rejecting his argument that he owned the copyright in the artwork as the creator and owner of the AI program through which it was generated. Thaler v. Perlmutter, 687 F. Supp. 3d 140 (D.D.C. 2023); 134 F. 4th 1039.
In practical terms, the law remains unchanged: Human authorship—that is, creation by a human—continues to be a key prerequisite for copyright protection. That being said, AI-generatedcontributions to a broader, human-created work do not disqualify the work from copyright protection. Rather, in a work that contains both human- and AI-generated content, only the material created by humans is eligible for copyright protection.
This principle is reflected in the current U.S. copyright application, in which applicants must disclose any material within their applied-for work that is ineligible for copyright protection and therefore excluded from their application, including preexisting material and AI-generated content. Therefore, if you are creating a work of visual art, novel, screenplay, or other work with the help of AI, we recommend that you keep track of which elements of the work you created, and which were generated by AI, so that you are clear on which portions of your work are eligible for copyright protection should you apply to register or enforce your copyright in the work.