Supreme Court denies certiorari in AI-authorship case Thaler v. Perlmutter
Computer scientist Stephen Thaler had listed his 'Creativity Machine' system as sole author of an artwork; the Court's denial, issued without comment, leaves the D.C. Circuit's ruling as the law.
- Courts & copyright
- Notable
The US Supreme Court denied certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter, declining without comment to hear an appeal over whether a work generated by an AI system without a human creative contribution can be copyrighted. The denial left in place a ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which had affirmed that copyright law requires a human author.
The case began in 2018, when Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist, applied to register a copyright for a visual artwork, “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” listing his self-described AI system, the “Creativity Machine” (also referred to in later coverage as DABUS), as the work’s sole author and himself only as owner. The US Copyright Office rejected the application in 2022 on the grounds that copyrightable works require human authorship — a position a federal district court upheld in 2023, calling human authorship a “bedrock requirement” of copyright, and the D.C. Circuit affirmed in 2025.
By declining to hear the case, the Supreme Court did not itself rule on AI authorship; it simply let the lower courts’ reasoning stand as binding law in the circuits that had already ruled. The denial did not resolve adjacent questions the case had not squarely presented — how much human involvement in an AI-assisted work is enough to support a copyright claim, for instance, an issue the Copyright Office had already begun addressing case by case in its own guidance. But it closed off, for the foreseeable future, any prospect of a nationwide rule allowing AI systems themselves to hold authorship, keeping US copyright law anchored to human creators as generative tools became more capable and more widely used to produce commercial work.