A while back I argued that if an AI writes your code, probably nobody owns it, and that the question was still working its way through the courts. One of those courts has now answered. On March 18, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed the lower court in Thaler v. Perlmutter, and the speculation I wrote about in the overview got a good deal less speculative.
What the court actually held
The ruling is blunt: human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright. The Copyright Act of 1976 requires every eligible work to be authored, in the first instance, by a human being. Stephen Thaler had tried to register a work generated by his AI system, the "Creativity Machine," listing the machine as the sole author. The Office said no, the district court agreed, and now a federal appeals court has agreed too. This is no longer one trial judge's opinion. It's appellate precedent.
Why a machine can't be an author
The court's reasoning is worth knowing, because it explains why this isn't going to flip on a technicality. The Copyright Act never defines "author," but the rest of the statute only makes sense if authors are human. Copyright passes to heirs and surviving spouses. Its term is measured against a human lifespan. An author needs a domicile and a nationality, can sign a transfer, and can hold and own property. A machine has none of that. It has no heirs, no lifespan in the relevant sense, no signature, no nationality, and no capacity to own anything, including its own output. Strip out the human and the whole statutory machinery has nothing to attach to.
The part that matters for the rest of us
Here's the line developers should hold onto. The court was careful to say this requirement does not impede the protection of works made with the help of AI. The author is "the person who created, operated, or used artificial intelligence, and not the machine itself." So this decision doesn't outlaw AI-assisted development. It draws the line exactly where I said it would be: at human creative contribution. Pure machine output sits outside copyright. Work where a human is genuinely doing the expressive part can still be yours.
Nothing about my advice changes; it just has a federal appeals court behind it now. Keep a human in the loop on anything you intend to own, keep the record of who did what, and stop treating raw AI output as a protectable asset. The one thread still loose is whether the Supreme Court will weigh in. Until it does, this is the law you plan around.