By Blake Brittain
WASHINGTON, March 2 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to take up the issue of whether art generated by artificial intelligence can be copyrighted under U.S. law, turning away a case involving a computer scientist from Missouri who was denied a copyright for a piece of visual art made by his AI system.
Plaintiff Stephen Thaler had appealed to the justices after lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision that the AI-crafted visual art at issue in the case was ineligible for copyright protection because it did not have a human creator.
Thaler, of St. Charles, Missouri, applied for a federal copyright registration in 2018 covering “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” visual art he said his AI technology “DABUS” created. The image shows train tracks entering a portal, surrounded by what appears to be green and purple plant imagery.
The Copyright Office rejected his application in 2022, finding that creative works must have human authors to be eligible to receive a copyright.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration had urged the Supreme Court not to hear Thaler’s appeal.
The Copyright Office has separately rejected bids by artists for copyrights on images generated by the AI system Midjourney. Those artists argued that they were entitled to copyrights for images they created with AI assistance – unlike Thaler, who said his system created “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” independently.
A federal judge in Washington upheld the office’s decision in Thaler’s case in 2023, writing that human authorship is a “bedrock requirement of copyright.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed the ruling in 2025.
Thaler’s lawyers told the Supreme Court in a filing that his case was of “paramount importance” considering the rapid rise of generative AI.
With a refusal by the court to hear the appeal, Thaler’s lawyers said, “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.”
“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,” the administration said.
The Supreme Court previously rejected Thaler’s request to hear his argument in a separate case involving prototypes for a beverage holder and a light beacon concerning whether AI-generated inventions should be eligible for U.S. patent protection. His patent applications were rejected by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on similar grounds.
(Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham)
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