Can I copyright a song made with AI?

What the records show

The controlling case is Thaler v. Perlmutter. Stephen Thaler tried to register a work he said was authored solely by a machine. The Copyright Office refused; the D.C. Circuit affirmed the refusal on March 18, 2025, holding that the Copyright Act's authorship requirement means human authorship. On March 2, 2026 the Supreme Court denied Thaler's petition (docket 25-449).

Two precise points people get wrong:

• The Supreme Court did not rule on AI copyright. Declining to review is not a merits decision — it simply leaves the D.C. Circuit's ruling in place.
• The ruling covers works authored solely by a machine. It does not say a song you made with AI tools is unprotectable. The Copyright Office's position is that human creative contributions (selection, arrangement, editing, added performance, lyrics you wrote) are protectable; the purely AI-generated material inside the work is not.

What this means in practice

If you prompt a generator and release the raw output, you likely have no US copyright in it. If you write the lyrics, structure the track, re-record parts, arrange and edit — your contributions are yours. Where the line sits in specific cases is being worked out registration by registration; no court has drawn it sharply yet, and our record for the case tracks every procedural change.