The Final Word? Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Case on AI Authorship and Inventorship

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to weigh in on whether artificial intelligence (AI) can be an author under U.S. copyright law. On March 2, 2026, the Court denied certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter (Case No. 25-449) and turned away Dr. Stephen Thaler's years-long quest to secure copyright protection for a piece of visual art he says his AI system, DABUS, autonomously created.

The denial marks the end of the road – at least for now – for Thaler's efforts to establish that AI-generated works are entitled to intellectual property (IP) protection.

For those who have been following this saga on IP/Decode, the result is perhaps unsurprising. But its implications are worth unpacking.

A Quick Recap

As previously discussed, Thaler applied for a federal copyright registration in 2018 for "A Recent Entrance to Paradise," a piece of visual art that Thaler acknowledged was autonomously created by his DABUS AI software. In the application, Thaler listed his AI software – not himself – as the author of the work. The U.S. Copyright Office rejected the application in 2022, finding that copyrightable creative works require human authors.

Thaler challenged that decision in federal court, but in 2023, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia affirmed the Copyright Office's rejection. Notably, the district court wrote that human authorship is a "bedrock requirement of copyright." On appeal in 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed the district court's ruling. Now that the Supreme Court has denied certiorari, Thaler has exhausted his appeals.

A Matching Pattern in Patent Law

Thaler's copyright battle parallels his patent case. Thaler filed two patent applications listing DABUS as the sole inventor. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) refused both applications and concluded that the Patent Act limits inventorship to natural persons. That decision was ultimately affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Thaler v. Vidal, 43 F.4th 1207 (Fed. Cir. 2022), and the Supreme Court previously declined to hear that case as well.

On the patent space more generally, as we recently discussed, the USPTO issued updated guidance in November 2025 to reinforce that only natural persons can be named as inventors – even when AI plays a significant role in the inventive process. The guidance makes clear that AI is best understood as a sophisticated tool, akin to a laboratory instrument, and that the touchstone of inventorship remains "conception," an inherently human act.

The common thread between both bodies of IP law is clear: Only human beings can be inventors or authors. AI, no matter how sophisticated, is a tool – not a creator.

What's Next?

Thaler's attorneys warned that the Supreme Court's refusal to hear the case could "irreversibly and negatively impact[] AI development and use in the creative industry during critically important years." The denial, however, does not necessarily foreclose all future litigation on the subject.

For now, however, the message from the courts and administrative bodies is consistent: If you want IP protection, there must be a human in the process. Practitioners and innovators leveraging AI tools should take heed. As the USPTO's 2025 Guidance counsels, careful documentation of human contributions to the creative and inventive process is more critical than ever.