Copyright Registration for AI-Assisted Works

You can register a work made with AI help, but only for the parts a human actually authored. The U.S. Copyright Office's March 16, 2023 registration guidance (88 Fed. Reg. 16190) requires human authorship and makes you disclose and exclude AI-generated material that is more than de minimis. Its January 29, 2025 report, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability, confirmed that prompts alone do not make you the author.

On March 2, 2026 the Supreme Court declined to hear Thaler v. Perlmutter, leaving the human-authorship rule in place. This guide explains what the Office actually requires, what "sufficient human control" has looked like in real registrations, how to fill in the application when part of a work is AI-assisted, and what gets refused.

The rule: copyright protects human authorship only

The Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices has long said that "to qualify as a work of authorship a work must be created by a human being" and that the Office "will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author" (section 313.2). The 2023 guidance applied that rule to generative AI, and the courts have backed it: the work in Thaler, an image the applicant said was created autonomously by his AI system, was refused, the refusal was upheld on appeal, and the Supreme Court denied review on March 2, 2026.

The test the Office uses is whether the "traditional elements of authorship," the literary, artistic, or musical expression and the selection and arrangement, were "actually conceived and executed" by a human or by the machine. When the AI decides the expressive elements, that output is not human authorship and cannot be claimed.

What the March 2023 guidance requires

Applicants "have a duty to disclose the inclusion of AI-generated content in a work submitted for registration and to provide a brief explanation of the human author's contributions." Concretely:

• Use the Standard Application ($65 government fee), not the $45 Single Application.
• Name the human author(s) only. Do not list an AI tool or the company that provides it as an author or co-author.
• Describe the human contribution in the Author Created field. The Office's own model wording for a mixed work is "Selection, coordination, and arrangement of [describe human-authored content] created by the author and [describe AI content] generated by artificial intelligence."
• Exclude the AI-generated material that is more than de minimis: in the Limitation of the Claim section, under Material Excluded, choose Other and enter something like "[description of content] generated by artificial intelligence."
• Add context if useful in the Note to CO field. If you are unsure, the guidance says you may simply state that the work contains AI-generated material and the Office will contact you; in some cases it will conclude that nothing needs to be disclaimed.

The guidance also stresses that using technology is not the problem. A photographer editing in Photoshop or a musician using guitar pedals is still the author; "what matters is the extent to which the human had creative control over the work's expression."

What the January 2025 report added

Part 2 of the Office's AI report, issued January 29, 2025 after more than 10,000 public comments, did not change the registration rules; it set out the reasoning behind them and closed the door on some arguments. Its conclusions, in the Office's words:

• "The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output."
• "Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material."
• "Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements."
• "Based on the functioning of current generally available technology, prompts do not alone provide sufficient control."
• "Human authors are entitled to copyright in their works of authorship that are perceptible in AI-generated outputs, as well as the creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of material in the outputs, or creative modifications of the outputs."
• Whether the human contribution is enough "must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis," and no new legislation or sui generis right is warranted.

The report says the Office will issue additional registration guidance and update the Compendium; as of this writing the 2023 guidance is still the operative instruction for applicants.

What "sufficient human control" looks like in practice

Three patterns pass, and one does not:

• Your own expression is visible in the output. You wrote the text, drew the sketch, or recorded the melody, and the AI enhanced, cleaned up, or extended it. The human-authored expression that remains perceptible in the result is yours.
• Creative selection and arrangement. The Office's February 2023 decision on the graphic novel Zarya of the Dawn kept the registration for the author's text and her selection and arrangement of the images, but cancelled the claim to the individual Midjourney images. In January 2025 the Office registered a digital image assembled with an inpainting tool through many rounds of human selection and editing, with the claim limited to the selection, coordination, and arrangement of the AI-generated material rather than the material itself.
• Creative modification. Substantial hand edits to AI output can be registered as your authorship if the changes themselves meet the originality standard; the AI-generated base still gets disclaimed.
• Prompting alone does not. The guidance's example: ask a model to "write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare" and the machine "will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure." Prompts function "like instructions to a commissioned artist," and re-prompting for revisions still leaves the machine deciding how to implement them.

Keep your working files. Drafts, layered project files, edit histories, and prompt logs are what let you describe your contribution credibly if the examiner asks.

What gets refused

• Wholly AI-generated works and works where the applicant cannot identify any human-authored expression.
• Claims to raw prompt output, however elaborate the prompt.
• Applications naming an AI system as author or claiming the AI-generated portions as your own.
• Undisclosed AI material. The guidance warns that if information "essential to its evaluation of registrability" was omitted, the Office may cancel the registration, and under 17 U.S.C. 411(b) a court can disregard a registration obtained with knowingly inaccurate information that would have led to a refusal.

A refusal is not a finding that you did nothing creative; it means the claim as described did not identify registrable human authorship. Re-describing the human contribution accurately is often the fix.

How to fill in the application, step by step

1. Separate the layers. Before you file, list what a human wrote, drew, played, edited, or arranged, and what the AI produced.
2. File the Standard Application for the correct type of work: literary work for text and code, visual arts for images, performing arts or sound recording for music, motion picture for video.
3. Author Created: describe only the human authorship, for example "text, and selection, coordination, and arrangement of images generated by artificial intelligence."
4. Limitation of Claim, Material Excluded, Other: "images generated by artificial intelligence" (or text, music, code, as applicable).
5. Note to CO: a sentence or two on the tools and how you used them, if the split is not obvious.
6. Deposit the whole work as it exists, including the AI-generated parts; the limitation in the application, not a redacted deposit, is what defines the claim.

Already registered, or pending, without disclosing AI?

The guidance tells you what to do. For a pending application, contact the Public Information Office and report that the application omitted the fact that the work contains AI-generated material; staff add a note for the examiner. For a completed registration, file a supplementary registration ($100 online) that describes the human authorship in Author Created, disclaims the AI material under Material Excluded, and completes New Material Added. As long as there is sufficient human authorship, the Office issues a new supplementary certificate with the disclaimer. Doing nothing risks cancellation and a registration a court may disregard.

Notes by type of work

• Books and articles. Human-written text mixed with AI passages: claim your text, exclude the AI passages. See how to copyright a book.
• Songs and beats. An AI-generated track you did not compose or perform is not registrable; your lyrics, melody, or edited arrangement can be. See how to copyright music.
• Logos and images. A logo produced by an image generator from a prompt is unregistrable on two counts, no human authorship and often too little original artwork; see how to copyright a logo. Human illustration refined with AI tools is a different case.
• Software. Code written by a coding assistant is AI-generated material; the developer's own code and creative arrangement can be claimed. See how to copyright software and apps.

The registration itself still does what it always did: it is required before you can sue, and timely filing preserves statutory damages for the human-authored portions. We are a filing service, not a law firm; if you are unsure whether your contribution clears the bar, an intellectual property attorney can advise on your specific work. If you file with us, tell us exactly which parts were AI-generated so the application discloses and limits the claim the way the Office expects; the price is $149 including the $65 Standard Application fee, filed within 2-3 business days.