US Supreme Court Confirms that Art Created by AI Cannot be Copyrighted

The US Supreme Court has declined to hear a case trying to overturn the lower courts decision on AI art and copyright.

The interesting thing about work created by AI is that it cannot be copyrighted. So, whatever work AI does produce is immediately placed into the public domain. This is not just my opinion, but rather, the opinion of the courts as well. Stephen Thaler has been wanting to make it official that whatever crappy work AI outputs is protected by copyright. The thing is, he keeps losing in court.

Back in 2022, TechDirt did a writeup on this story while I was a little busy covering the link tax madness (among other things) at the time:

Stephen Thaler is a man on a mission. It’s not a very good mission, but it’s a mission. He created something called DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience) and claims that it’s creating things, for which he has tried to file for patents and copyrights around the globe, with his mission being to have DABUS named as the inventor or author. This is dumb for many reasons. The purpose of copyright and patents are to incentivize the creation of these things, by providing to the inventor or author a limited time monopoly, allowing them to, in theory, use that monopoly to make some money, thereby making the entire inventing/authoring process worthwhile. An AI doesn’t need such an incentive. And this is why patents and copyright only are given to persons and not animals or AI.

But Thaler has spent years trying to get patent offices around the world to give DABUS a patent. I’ll just note here that if Thaler is correct, then it seems to me that he shouldn’t be able to do this at all, as it’s not his invention to patent. It’s DABUS’s. And unless DABUS has hired Thaler to seek a patent, it’s a little unclear to me why Thaler has any say here.

Either way, Thaler’s somewhat quixotic quest continues to fail. The EU Patent Office rejected his application. The Australian patent office similarly rejected his request. In that case, a court sided with Thaler after he sued the Australian patent office, and said that his AI could be named as an inventor, but thankfully an appeals court set aside that ruling a few months ago. In the US, Thaler/DABUS keeps on losing as well. Last fall, he lost in court as he tried to overturn the USPTO ruling, and then earlier this year, the US Copyright Office also rejected his copyright attempt (something it has done a few times before). In June, he sued the Copyright Office over this, which seems like a long shot.

And now, he’s also lost his appeal of the ruling in the patent case. CAFC, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit — the appeals court that handles all patent appeals — has rejected Thaler’s request just like basically every other patent and copyright office, and nearly all courts.

Indeed, the important question when it comes to copyright or patent is who created the original work. In the case of AI, no person did which means a key component for protection is missing. Nevertheless, while the story did drop off somewhat in 2022, the court battles did continue as Thaler continued his quest for patent and copyright protection for his AI. Recently, we learned that Thalter has lost at the US Supreme Court as well after it declined to hear the case. From The Verge:

The US Supreme Court has declined to hear a case over whether AI-generated art can obtain a copyright, as reported earlier by Reuters. The Monday decision comes after Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist from Missouri, appealed a court’s decision to uphold a ruling that found AI-generated art can’t be copyrighted.

In 2019, the US Copyright Office rejected Thaler’s request to copyright an image, called A Recent Entrance to Paradise, on behalf of an algorithm he created. The Copyright Office reviewed the decision in 2022 and determined that the image doesn’t include “human authorship,” disqualifying it from copyright protection.

After Thaler appealed the decision, US District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled in 2023 that “human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright.” That ruling was later upheld in 2025 by a federal appeals court in Washington, DC. As reported by Reuters, Thaler asked the Supreme Court to review the ruling in October 2025, arguing it “created a chilling effect on anyone else considering using AI creatively.”

I think it’s not controversial to say that this is a good ruling. There’s no way that art or text generated by AI should be protected by copyright in the first place. As the judges have repeatedly found, protection requires authorship of a person. AI created content has no such thing. As such, whatever AI spits out is immediately put in the public domain.

What’s funny here is the fact that this also complicates the AI doomer narrative about how AI is going to take over everything. One claim I’ve heard repeatedly throughout 2023 and 2024 is how the creation of AI generated art was going to mean that there would no longer be a need for artists to create art as AI would simply take over and do that work. The problem is that AI generated art sucks and people making money on art continues to be a thing to this very day. If it’s all in the public domain, it makes it more difficult to generate any kind of revenue off of it.

At any rate, this appears to be the end of the road for these claims. If AI created a piece of art or text, caselaw says that it’s in the public domain, end of story.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.