High Court Shouldn’t Weigh AI’s Copyright Author Status, US Says

The US Solicitor General advised the US Supreme Court not to take up a computer scientist’s petition to consider whether AI could be an author under copyright law.

A decision foreclosing nonhuman authorship for Stephen Thaler’s Creativity Machine didn’t conflict with any in other circuits or raise complicated questions about protections for artificial intelligence-assisted work by human authors, the Jan. 23 filing said.

That Thaler built and owns his image generator doesn’t change that the AI can’t be listed as the author of what he used it to create, the government said.

The filing urges the justices to let stand the ruling of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rather than take up the case to set a national precedent. Other circuits have “repeatedly rejected efforts to obtain copyright in works allegedly authored by nonhumans,” the brief said.

The Copyright Office refused in 2019 to register an image Thaler submitted because his application listed a machine as the author. Thaler sued the office, but the US District Court for the District of Columbia and DC Circuit agreed human authorship was required.

The government rejected Thaler’s assertion that the refusal of his application discourages investment in AI and eliminates incentives to develop and use creative AI to generate “socially valuable goods.”

His claim “vastly overstates the significance of this case and the breadth” of the ruling, it said. The Copyright Office routinely registers AI-assisted works—but with human authors named, it said.

Thaler’s high court petition argued the Copyright Office is “policing methods of creation” and “placing a judgment on AI users” by denying registration based on the work’s methods.

Extending its logic would also nullify photography copyright because it disregards randomness and luck that wasn’t a direct contribution of a human author, Thaler said.

The government’s Jan. 23 filing said none of the cases cited involved bids to register the camera itself as the author. The Copyright Office makes case-by-case determinations regarding whether the human contribution to AI-generated outputs are sufficiently creative to constitute authorship, it said.

Brown Neri Smith & Khan LLP represents Thaler.

The case is Thaler v. Perlmutter, U.S., No. 25-449, brief in opposition filed 1/23/26.