In a carefully reasoned 48 page order, the Copyright Office answered a question that had been pending since the year 2022, can an artificial intelligence (‘AI’) machine be an ‘author’ under the Copyright Act, 1957 (‘the Act’)? The Registrar of Copyrights in the Order dated August 31, 2026, held the same in negative. But read past the headline that has caught attention, the order turns out to be far more interesting than a mere rejection. It is, if anything, an unusually generous account of how much of the creative act a human being can hand over to a machine and still keep the copyright.
In May 2022, Dr. Stephen Thaler applied to register an artistic work titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise.[1]” In the column meant for the author, Dr. Thaler entered not his own name but DABUS i.e. the “Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience,” an AI system. The Office raised an objection calling upon Dr. Thaler to identify a ‘natural’ or ‘juridical’ person as the “author” instead. Subsequent to directions passed by the High Court of Delhi in a Writ Petition[2] preferred by Dr. Thaler, the Copyright Office moved promptly on that direction. The Registrar distilled the dispute into four questions: (1) did the artistic work meet the threshold of originality under Section 13 of the Act; (2) who, on the Applicant’s own facts, was “the person who causes the work to be created” within the meaning of Section 2(d)(vi) of the Act; (3) was the Applicant’s ownership claim consistent with the authorship Dr. Thaler had pleaded under Sections 17 to 19 of the Act; and (4) could DABUS at least be named in the Register of Copyright as the “generator” behind the work, short of being called its “author”.
On originality, the Copyright Office sided with the Applicant. The fact that the work was generated through algorithmic or computational processes cannot, by itself, render the resulting expression unoriginal. It was held that a work is not deprived of originality merely because technology played an indispensable role in its production. The generative process must be examined as a whole. Where a legally recognized person, in this case Dr. Thaler, supplies and curates the relevant inputs, configures and initiates a non-trivial generative process, and thereby causes an independently generated expressive work to come into existence, the absence of real-time human intervention at the final computational stage does not, by itself, defeat originality.
On authorship, the Copyright Office did not accede to the submissions of the Applicant, though not quite for the reason one might expect. DABUS was refused not principally because it lacks a human authorship, but because Section 2(d)(vi) of the Act asks a narrower question, namely, who caused the work to be created?, not what device or machine executed the final computation. Applying that test to Dr. Thaler’s own account namely that he built DABUS, trained it, personally photographed the visual inputs, curated the linguistic material, and set the process running. Though the Registrar of Copyright found Dr. Thaler himself was “the person who caused the work to be created.”, DABUS ran the computational act, however, Dr. Thaler was the effective cause and mastermind. Yet the Copyright application failed, because Dr. Thaler had named DABUS as the “author” and himself only as the Applicant, a split that the Copyright Act does not permit. An “author” with no legal or juristic capacity to hold or assign copyright cannot hand title to anyone. Offered the chance, during the course of hearing hearings, to correct the “author” column to Dr. Thaler’s name, the Applicant declined and insisted on DABUS being the “author” of the artistic work. The application was rejected not because AI-assisted work cannot be owned, but because the Applicant Dr. Thaler refused to claim the authorship the Act was, by the end, prepared to grant.
The doctrinal spine of the order is the “mastermind” or “effective cause” test, drawn from Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony[3] and Aalmuhammed v. Lee.[4] The inquiry is not who performed the last mechanical act, but who conceived, configured and exercised creative control over the process as a whole. The Applicant’s own submission, that his (Dr. Thaler) role was merely “antecedent” while DABUS was the “immediate cause,” was in effect turned against the Applicant.
The Office also declined to import the corporate-producer model from Section 2(d)(v) of the Act, holding that each limb of Section 2(d) is a self-contained allocation of authorship, not to be read with one another. Whether artificial intelligence should ever hold legal personality, the order notes, is “a policy decision strictly reserved for Parliament” which is a restraint that reads as institutional care rather than evasion.
Cases like this rarely hand out clean victories, and this one is no exception. The lesson for anyone building products or IP with AI tools is not that AI-assisted output is unprotectable, the Copyright Office has just held the opposite. The lesson is that the account you give of how a work was created gets taken at its word, and that word matters more than the underlying technology. Insisting a work was “fully AI-generated” or “created autonomously,” however well it plays in a press release, comes uncomfortably close to signing away the claim you meant to protect. What survives scrutiny, on this order’s logic, is the unglamorous trail: prompts given, inputs curated, drafts reviewed, edits made, approvals recorded namely the record of a human causing a work to exist, rather than merely “watching” creation of one. Legal teams would do well to treat that trail as an asset, not an afterthought, since the same absence of human involvement that defeats a copyright claim will, defeat an infringement suit brought to enforce it later. A Defendant facing an AI-origin claim now has good reason to ask the Plaintiff to prove a human actually “authored” the work, and after this order, that is no longer a rhetorical question.
Four years after Dr. Thaler filed the Copyright application for the artistic work in question, the Copyright Office answered a question that has already occupied Courts worldover, with more nuance than the headline “AI cannot be an author” will let on. The debate has quietly moved past whether an AI-assisted work can be owned at all. What the order really asks, and leaves the rest of us to keep answering one dispute at a time, is how much of the creative act a human being may hand over to a machine before the law stops recognising them as its author.
*Mr. Udayvir Rana, Partner at Chamber One
**Mr. Pranay Chitale, Partner at Chamber One
[1] Diary No.: 9356/2022-CO/A before the Registrar of Copyrights; Applicant: Dr. Stephen L. Thaler dated May 03, 2022
[2]Stephen L. Thaler v. Union of India & Ors.; W.P.(C)-IPD 15/2026 dated April 09, 2026
[3]Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony (884)
[4]Aalmuhammed v. Lee (9th Cir. 2000)