WASHINGTON, March 2 - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday opted not to review a dispute over whether art generated by artificial intelligence may be copyrighted under U.S. law. The court’s refusal leaves intact lower-court decisions that denied copyright protection for a visual work that its creator says was produced independently by an AI system.
The case centers on Stephen Thaler of St. Charles, Missouri, who applied in 2018 for federal registration of a piece titled "A Recent Entrance to Paradise," which he says was created by his AI system known as DABUS. The image depicts train tracks entering a portal, surrounded by imagery that appears to be green and purple plant life.
In 2022 the U.S. Copyright Office rejected Thaler’s registration request, concluding that works must have human authors to qualify for copyright. Federal courts upheld that conclusion: a Washington judge affirmed the office’s position in 2023, writing that human authorship is a "bedrock requirement of copyright," and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed the ruling in 2025.
Thaler appealed to the Supreme Court after those losses in the lower courts. His legal team argued to the justices that the question carries "paramount importance" given the rapid rise of generative AI, cautioning that a refusal to hear the case could allow the Copyright Office to shape practice in ways that would harm AI development and creative use during "critically important years." Their filing warned that "even if it later overturns the Copyright Office’s test in another case, it will be too late. The Copyright Office will have irreversibly and negatively impacted AI development and use in the creative industry during critically important years."
The Biden administration, through the Copyright Office, has maintained that provisions across the Copyright Act indicate that the term "author" refers to a human rather than a machine. The administration urged the Supreme Court not to take up Thaler’s appeal, saying in effect that the statutory framework supports human authorship as a requirement.
The Copyright Office has also rejected other registration attempts for AI-related works. The office turned down requests from artists seeking copyrights for images produced with the Midjourney system; those applicants argued they were entitled to copyrights for works created with AI assistance. Thaler’s case differs in that he contends his system produced the work independently, without human co-authorship.
The Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the appeal follows a prior refusal to consider Thaler’s arguments in a separate matter over whether AI-generated inventions should be eligible for U.S. patents. In that earlier dispute, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had rejected Thaler’s patent applications for prototypes described as a beverage holder and a light beacon on the basis that they lacked a human inventor.
Implications and next steps
With the high court declining review, the existing legal framework rejecting AI-only authorship for copyrights remains controlling. That outcome preserves the Copyright Office’s registration practice and the judicial rulings that upheld it, at least until another case presents the question to the justices or Congress takes action. The refusal to hear the appeal therefore sustains legal uncertainty for creators, technologists, and businesses working with generative AI.