Facts
Dr. Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist, built a generative AI system he calls the “Creativity Machine”. The system produced a picture that Thaler titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise”, and he applied to the U.S. Copyright Office to register it. The application named the Creativity Machine as the sole author and Thaler only as the work’s owner. The Office refused registration under its long-standing human-authorship requirement. Thaler sought review in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which upheld the refusal, and he then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Question
The central question was whether a non-human machine can be the author of a work under the Copyright Act of 1976. Thaler also argued in the alternative that the machine was his employee, so that he should be treated as the author under the work-made-for-hire provision, and that he was the author in any event because he made and used the machine. The Copyright Office further argued that the Constitution itself requires human authorship, which put a constitutional question before the court as well.
Decision
The D.C. Circuit affirmed. Judge Millett, writing for the panel, held that the Act requires every eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being. The court read the word “author” in light of the statute as a whole: copyright terms measured by the author’s life, inheritance rights for surviving family, signature requirements for transfers, and rules on nationality and domicile only make sense for people. The work-made-for-hire argument failed because that provision also presupposes a human author. The court did not reach Thaler’s claim to personal authorship, finding it waived before the agency, and left the constitutional question open.
Why it matters
In this case a federal court of appeals held that a work generated autonomously by an AI system cannot be registered for copyright in the United States. The court added that the rule leaves room for works made with the help of AI, provided a human being is the author. Because Thaler named the machine as sole author, the court did not have to decide how much human input is enough, so that line is left to Copyright Office practice and future cases.
Related stages
On March 2, 2026 the U.S. Supreme Court denied Thaler’s petition for certiorari (No. 25-449), leaving the D.C. Circuit’s decision in place. Thaler’s patent application naming his DABUS system as inventor was also refused in Japan (see the separate entry).