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. The court turned away a case involving a computer scientist from Missouri who was denied a copyright for a piece of visual art made by artificial intelligence.
Plaintiff Stephen Thaler approached the justices after the lower courts upheld a decision by the U.S. Copyrights Office, which said that art created by AI 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. His application was rejected in 2022, saying that creative works should have a human creator to be eligible to receive a copyright.
READ: Bill Gates’ doubt, Satya Nadella’s bet on OpenAI, reaffirms nonprofit control (
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 platform Midjourney. Unlike Thaler, those artists argued they were entitled to copyrights for images they created with AI assistance. Thaler, on the other hand 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.
“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,” Thaler’s lawyers said.
READ: Nvidia, Amazon, SoftBank invest in OpenAI’s $110 billion funding round (
“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 had previously rejected a separate request by Thaler, in a 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.