The Supreme Court leaves the human authorship rule intact
The Court declined to hear Thaler v. Perlmutter, leaving standing the D.C. Circuit ruling that the Copyright Act requires a work to be authored by a human being.
Why it matters
Whether a machine can be an author under US law is settled: it cannot. That fixes one side of the copyright problem while the other - training on protected works - remained open.
Certiorari was denied on 2 March 2026, without comment, in case number 25-449. Stephen Thaler had asked the Court to consider whether works outputted by an artificial intelligence system without a direct, traditional authorial contribution by a natural person can be copyrighted. He had listed his Creativity Machine as the sole author of the image A Recent Entrance to Paradise and himself as the owner. The denial leaves in place the D.C. Circuit's ruling that the Copyright Act requires a human author. Thaler's appeals are exhausted.