This is the last stop on a road I've been following since the overview and the appeals court ruling. On March 2, 2026, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter, declining to hear the case. For anyone building software with AI, that quiet one-line order is the most consequential thing to happen to this question yet.
What a cert denial means, and what it doesn't
Stephen Thaler petitioned the Court in October 2025, asking it to decide whether a work created entirely by AI, with no traditional human contribution, can be copyrighted at all. The Court said no thanks. A denial of certiorari is not a ruling on the merits. The justices didn't endorse the D.C. Circuit's reasoning, and a denial doesn't create nationwide binding precedent the way a full opinion would. What it does is leave the appeals court decision undisturbed. The human-only rule stands, and the Court has signaled it isn't in a hurry to revisit it.
What this means for your code
The practical effect is simple: the floor is now firm. Pure AI output has no human author, and with no human author there is no copyright. That's the rule you plan around today, not a maybe. If you've been waiting for the legal picture to clear before deciding how to handle AI-generated code, the waiting is over for the part that matters most to teams shipping software. The unsettled questions that remain are the harder, more interesting ones: exactly how much human contribution turns AI-assisted work into something protectable, and how that gets proven when authorship is challenged. Those are still fact-specific, and still decided by courts case by case.
The throughline
Three posts and three years later, the advice hasn't moved an inch, which is the point. Keep a human doing the expressive, creative work on anything you intend to own. Keep the record of who did what, in your commits and your version control. And don't mistake revenue from AI-generated code for owning an asset you can defend or sell. The courts have now said their piece, from the Copyright Office through the D.C. Circuit and up to a Supreme Court that chose to let it stand. Plan accordingly, and build something you can actually claim.