Who Owns What Your Business Creates With AI? Content, Code, and Designs Under Current U.S. Law

Updated October 2026

Every day, companies use AI tools to write marketing copy, generate code and design logos and packaging. It is only natural to assume that a business owns whatever it produces with a tool it pays for. That assumption is only partially true in current U.S. law.

Paying for an AI tool does not, by itself, make the business, or the employee operating the tool, the owner of what it produces. Two questions decide who owns AI-assisted work. First, does any intellectual property right exist in the output at all? Second, if one does, who holds it?

Copyright protects only human authorship

Copyright protection exists in "original works of authorship" (17 U.S.C. § 102(a)), and ownership vests first in the author (17 U.S.C. § 201(a)). The Copyright Act does not define 'author,' leaving the courts to decide whether a machine qualifies.

In Thaler v. Perlmutter, 130 F.4th 1039 (D.C. Cir. 2025), the D.C. Circuit held that the Copyright Act requires every work to be authored in the first instance by a human being. The applicant had listed his AI system as the sole author of an image, and the Copyright Office refused to register it. The Supreme Court denied certiorari on March 2, 2026 (No. 25-449). The court noted that the rule "does not prohibit copyrighting work that was made by or with the assistance of artificial intelligence." How much human input makes a given AI-assisted work copyrightable is a question the court left unanswered.

The rule requires only that the author be a human being (the person who created, operated, or used the AI), not the machine itself.

The U.S. Copyright Office draws the line in its March 2023 registration guidance (88 Fed. Reg. 16190) and in its January 29, 2025 report, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability. Prompts alone do not give a user enough control over the expression to make that user the author of the output. Copyright can still protect a person's creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of AI-generated material, substantial human modifications of AI output, and any human-authored material that remains visible in the result. In each case, only the human contribution is protected, not the AI-generated material itself.

Copyright registration carries a disclosure duty. The applicant must disclose the inclusion of AI-generated content, exclude that content from the claim if it is more than de minimis, and briefly describe the human author's contribution. Under 17 U.S.C. § 411(b), a court in an infringement action may disregard the registration if the applicant included inaccurate information with knowledge that it was inaccurate, and the accurate information would have caused the Register of Copyrights to refuse registration.

Content, code, and designs

Content. Text, images, and video generated from a prompt and used as produced likely carry no copyright. Material a person writes, edits substantially, or arranges creatively does.

Code. Source code is protected as a literary work, so the same rule applies. Protection extends only to human-authored expression: where a developer writes code or substantially modifies AI output, the human contributions are protectable, but AI-generated portions are not. Code accepted from an AI assistant unchanged is generally not protectable (U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability (Jan. 2025)). Trade secret law can fill part of the gap, because it does not depend on authorship. Information qualifies if the owner has taken reasonable measures to keep it secret and it derives independent economic value from not being generally known or readily ascertainable through proper means (18 U.S.C. § 1839(3)). Entering confidential code into a tool whose terms allow the provider to retain or train on inputs may undercut the argument that reasonable measures were taken.

Designs and branding. Logo artwork generated by AI may have no copyright, but trademark rights do not depend on who created the mark. They arise from using a distinctive mark in commerce to identify the source of goods or services (or, for federal registration, from a bona fide intent to use it), so an AI-generated logo can still function as, and be registered as, a trademark. Trademark protection differs in scope from copyright: it stops confusingly similar use as a source identifier (and, for famous marks, dilution), but it does not prevent others from copying the artwork for non-trademark purposes. A clearance search before adopting an AI-generated name or logo remains essential.

Inventions

Only a natural person can be named as an inventor on a U.S. patent. Thaler v. Vidal, 43 F.4th 1207 (Fed. Cir. 2022). On November 28, 2025, the USPTO published its Revised Inventorship Guidance for AI-Assisted Inventions, 90 Fed. Reg. 54636, which rescinded its February 2024 guidance in full. The guidance stated that there is no separate test for AI-assisted inventions. AI systems are treated as tools, comparable to laboratory equipment or software, and the major question is whether a human conceived the invention. The guidance applies to utility, design, and plant patents.

Tool terms and contracts

Most AI providers don't claim ownership of what you create with their tools. Many go further and hand over whatever rights they might have. But a contract can't transfer something that doesn't exist, so when no copyright arose in the first place, a promise of "all rights, if any" gives you very little. The terms still deserve a careful read. Some providers tie ownership to your subscription plan or your company's revenue. Some keep a broad license to use what you put in and what comes out. And indemnities against third-party claims are usually limited to paid business plans, often only if you've kept the provider's safety filters switched on.

Contracts for creative work need attention as well. A work is "made for hire" only where an employee prepares it within the scope of employment, or where a commissioned work falls within one of nine statutory categories and the parties sign a written agreement (17 U.S.C. § 101). Otherwise, the business needs a written assignment signed by the creator (17 U.S.C. § 204(a)). Neither device creates rights that never existed. A business may pay an agency for a logo or an application, receive a standard assignment, and later learn that key parts were AI-generated and cannot be registered or enforced.

Practical steps

• For core assets, have a person create or substantially shape the final work rather than using raw AI output.
• Keep drafts, edit histories, and records of creative choices to support registration and any later dispute.
• Disclose and exclude AI-generated material accurately when registering a work.
• Read the current terms for the specific plan in use, including ownership conditions, license grants, and indemnities.
• Keep trade secrets and client information out of tools that may retain or train on inputs.
• Add AI provisions to contractor and agency agreements covering disclosure of AI use, non-infringement warranties, and assignment of all human contributions.
• Before using an AI-generated name or logo, check that no other business is already using the same or a similar one, and register as trademarks the names and logos that matter most to your business.

This area of law is developing quickly, and pending litigation may change parts of this analysis.

This article is for general information only and is not legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship.