The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a dispute over whether AI-generated art deserves copyright protection, leaving intact lower-court rulings that say it does not.
The decision ends computer scientist Stephen Thaler's years-long crusade to secure intellectual property rights for images and inventions produced entirely by artificial intelligence. It also sends a clear message: machines don't get to be authors under American law.
Thaler sought copyright registration for an image titled "A Recent Entrance to Paradise." He claimed his AI system, dubbed DABUS, created the work independently. The U.S. Copyright Office rejected his application in 2022, finding that creative works must have human authors to qualify for copyright.
Thaler fought back. A U.S. district court judge ruled against him, holding the work could not be protected since it lacked a human creator. An appeals court affirmed that ruling in 2025.
Now the Supreme Court has shut the final door.
As Breitbart reported, the justices' refusal to hear Thaler's appeal leaves those lower-court rulings firmly in place. The disputed artwork, depicting train tracks entering a portal surrounded by green and purple plant imagery, remains unprotected.
The Trump administration made its position plain in a statement to Reuters:
"Although the Copyright Act does not define the term 'author,' multiple provisions of the act make clear that the term refers to a human rather than a machine."
That's not a novel legal theory. It's common sense rooted in the text of the law. Congress wrote the Copyright Act for human creators, not algorithms.
Newsmax noted that the justices left in place both the Copyright Office decision and the lower-court rulings denying protection to Thaler's AI-created image. The consistent message from every level of government: copyrightable works must have a human creator.
This wasn't Thaler's first attempt to win legal recognition for machine-made creations. Back in 2018, he applied for patents on two inventions, a food container and a search and rescue beacon, arguing that DABUS, not he, had invented them.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected both applications. The Supreme Court also denied hearing that argument.
The pattern is unmistakable. Thaler has lost at every turn:
Six strikes. No runs.
The Thaler case is just one front in a broader war over AI and intellectual property. Text-to-image tools like Midjourney went mainstream shortly after 2022, and the lawsuits followed fast.
Warner Bros. Discovery sued Midjourney last year. Artists filed a lawsuit against Google in 2024 after discovering the company's AI had scraped their work. OpenAI's ChatGPT and its text-to-video app Sora can generate images and videos of copyrighted characters, raising obvious questions about who owns what.
The Washington Examiner described another case that highlights the tension. Colorado game designer Jason Allen won a state fair art competition with an AI-generated image, then sought copyright registration. The Copyright Office denied it, stating the submission "contain[ed] no human authorship."
Allen pushed back, arguing that denying protection based on the tool used "could set a discriminatory precedent." But the Copyright Office held firm, stating that "users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material."
That distinction matters. Typing a prompt into a machine is not the same as painting a canvas or writing a novel.
The Supreme Court has been willing to uphold clear legal standards in other recent cases, and this decision fits the pattern. When the law says "author," it means a person. When it says "inventor," it means a person. No amount of Silicon Valley enthusiasm changes the text.
This is the same Court that has rejected progressive overreach from California and rebuked activist lower courts for second-guessing established authority. The justices aren't interested in rewriting statutes to suit the latest technological fad.
AI tools can do remarkable things. They can also flood the market with machine-generated content that undercuts real artists and real creators. Granting copyright to output that no human actually authored would reward the owners of algorithms at the expense of the people who still do the work.
The law protects human creativity. The Supreme Court just confirmed it intends to keep it that way.
