The U.S. Supreme Court decided on Monday local time to refuse to hear an appeal case on whether "artificial intelligence-generated artistic works can obtain copyright protection." This upheld the previous ruling of the lower court: AI-generated works do not meet the conditions for copyright protection. This decision means that under the current U.S. legal framework, artistic works that are completely generated by artificial intelligence systems and lack human creative participation will not be able to obtain copyright registration and protection.
The protagonist of the case is Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist from Missouri. In 2019, he applied to the U.S. Copyright Office to register copyright for an image called "A Recent Entrance to Paradise" in the name of an algorithm system he developed, but was rejected by the Copyright Office. The Copyright Office reconfirmed in a 2022 review that the image did not contain creative elements of a "human author" and therefore did not meet the basic requirements for copyright protection.
Salle then took the Copyright Office to court in an attempt to overturn the finding through judicial means. In 2023, U.S. Federal District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell clearly stated in his judgment that “human authorship is a prerequisite of the copyright system.cornerstoneRequirement." This ruling was upheld in 2025 by a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., which held that AI-generated works lacking a human creator cannot be copyrighted. In October of the same year, Sall appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the ruling had a "chilling effect" on all those who wish to use AI in creative ways, but the Supreme Court has now decided not to accept it, which is equivalent to "sealing confirmation" of the lower court's position.
At the broader regulatory level, the new guidance issued by the U.S. Copyright Office last year also provides additional explanations on related issues. The guidelines clearly state that AI images or other works generated based on text prompts do not themselves enjoy copyright protection; only those parts that reflect sufficient "human creative contributions" may obtain copyright recognition. This echoes the judicial judgment that “there must be a human author” in this case, further solidifying the policy direction of the United States on the copyright issue of AI-generated content.
This is not the first time that Sall has launched a legal challenge on AI issues in the field of intellectual property rights. Previously, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled that AI systems cannot be listed as patent inventors because they are not "human beings"; new guidance issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2024 also reiterates this position, requiring that only humans be listed as inventors in patent documents, but at the same time recognizing that humans can use AI tools as assistance in the invention process. This mutual confirmation of the Supreme Court’s refusal to accept the AI art copyright case shows that the United States adheres to the basic framework of “human creators/inventors” in its two major intellectual property systems, copyright and patents.