A federal appeals court in Washington, DC, has ruled that artwork created solely by AI without human involvement cannot be copyrighted under current United States law.

The decision, issued on Mar. 18, upheld the US Copyright Office’s rejection of a copyright application for an image produced by Stephen Thaler’s AI system, known as “DABUS.”

The ruling reaffirmed that copyright protections are limited to works authored by humans.

US Circuit Judge Patricia Millett, speaking for the unanimous three-judge panel, said that US copyright law “requires all work to be authored in the first instance by a human being.”

The court emphasized that the Copyright Act is coherent only when authorship is linked to a human creator.