Supreme Court Declines AI Copyright Case, Extending Legal Setback for AI-Generated Works

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a case challenging whether artwork created entirely by generative artificial intelligence qualifies for copyright protection, leaving intact rulings that limit U.S. copyrights to works created by humans.

The dispute involved computer scientist Stephen Thaler, who is seeking copyright protection for an image generated by his artificial intelligence. Lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision rejecting the application because the work lacked a human author.

“Thaler has been pursuing this somewhat quixotic litigation over an image created by an early generative AI model that he created and named the ‘creativity machine,’” Brian Fyre, a University of Kentucky law professor, told Decrypt.

Thaler first applied in 2018 for copyright protection covering “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” a visual artwork he said was autonomously created by his AI system, the Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience or DABUS. The Copyright Office rejected the application in 2022, finding that creative works must have human authors to qualify for protection.

In 2023, a federal judge sided with the U.S. Copyright Office in Thaler v. Perlmutter, ruling that images created entirely by artificial intelligence are not eligible for copyright protection because U.S. law protects only works with human authorship. A federal judge in Washington upheld the decision, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed that ruling in 2025.

“Pretty much everyone across the board has said human authorship is required, and AI doesn’t have human authorship, whatever we mean by that,” Fyre said.

In October, attorneys for Thaler filed a writ of certiorari, a formal request asking the Supreme Court of the United States to review and potentially overturn the lower court’s decision in the case.

“The Copyright Office’s reliance on its own nonstatutory requirements have led to an improper cabining of United States copyright law in contradiction of this Court’s precedent that copyright law should accommodate technological progress,” Thaler’s petition to the Supreme Court claimed.

“It was disappointing, but the Supreme Court does generally wait for circuit splits to develop before taking on such legal issues,” Thaler’s attorney Ryan Abbott, told Decrypt. “Hopefully, we will not have to wait too long for such a split with Allen v. Perlmutter for which briefing has just been completed at the District Court in Colorado.”

While the Supreme Court’s refusal ends Thaler’s appeal, Fyre explained, it does not resolve the broader legal debate.

“The Supreme Court denied the petition, so Thaler lost and the Court is not going to hear the case,” Fyre said. “What’s really interesting about that is that it suggests the Supreme Court thinks there’s something here it wants to talk about.”

Despite Thaler’s repeated attempts and legal defeats, Fyre described the copyright dispute as a test case; he said it did not amount to being frivolous.

“Thaler and his attorneys are making legitimate, interesting, and actually conceptually really difficult questions about the metaphysics of copyright law,” he said.

For now, courts in the United States continue to treat AI as a tool used by humans rather than a legal creator under existing intellectual property law. However, Fyre said similar disputes are likely to come, particularly involving plaintiffs with clearer stakes.

“It’s almost certain to come up again with a plaintiff that’s slightly differently situated, like a plaintiff that has an economic interest in the work in question that’s more robust than what Thaler has here,” he said.

Editor’s note: This article was updated after publication to include comments from Stephen Thaler’s attorney, Ryan Abbott.