Who Owns AI-Generated Content? What Businesses and Creators Need to Know Before They Publish, from Braslow Legal

A marketing team generates two hundred product images in an afternoon, a founder drafts an entire site with a chatbot, a musician builds a track around an AI vocal. Each assumes the output belongs to whoever paid for the subscription. The gap between what a terms of service page promises and what copyright law recognizes is where clients at Braslow Legal tend to get hurt. Ownership under a vendor agreement differs from ownership under the Copyright Act, and only one of those can be enforced against a stranger who copies your work.

Can you copyright something an AI made?

Not the parts generated purely by the machine. U.S. copyright protects works of human authorship, a requirement the Copyright Office spells out in Section 313.2 of its Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices and reaffirmed in its March 2023 registration guidance for works containing AI-generated material.

Courts have backed that position. In Thaler v. Perlmutter, the D.C. Circuit affirmed in March 2025 that a work listing an AI system as its sole author cannot be registered, because the Copyright Act presumes a human creator. The Copyright Office reached a similar conclusion in Part 2 of its report on copyright and artificial intelligence, published in January 2025, finding that prompts alone generally do not give a user enough control over the output to make that output the user’s own expression. Write a hundred word prompt, regenerate it fifteen times, pick your favorite: under current guidance, none of that converts the image into protectable authorship.

What part of an AI-assisted work is actually protectable?

The human contributions. When you select, arrange, edit, or add to AI output in a creative way, that layer of expression is yours even though the underlying generated material is not.

The registration of Zarya of the Dawn in 2023 illustrates the line. The Copyright Office registered the comic’s written text and the author’s selection and arrangement of the images, then cancelled protection for the Midjourney-generated illustrations. A retouched AI photograph or a layout built from generated elements carries a thin copyright covering only your changes. Someone who copies the raw generated image underneath has probably taken nothing you own.

Do I have to disclose AI use when I register a copyright?

Yes, if the AI-generated material is more than trivial. The application must identify the human-authored content and disclaim the AI-generated portions, and the Office has said applicants with pending or issued registrations should correct filings that omit that disclosure. A registration obtained by concealing AI involvement is vulnerable, and registration matters: under 17 U.S.C. § 412, you generally need to register before infringement begins, or within three months of publication, to seek statutory damages and attorney’s fees. Online filing runs $45 for a single author registering a single work and $65 for the standard application.

If copyright will not protect it, what will?

Contract, trade secret, trademark, and simple operational discipline carry more weight than most businesses expect.

A logo generated by AI may not be copyrightable, but it can still function as a trademark and be registered with the USPTO if it identifies the source of your goods. Customer lists, pricing models, and internal prompt libraries qualify as trade secrets provided you actually restrict access to them. For content where exclusivity is the entire point, the safest route is having a human create the core expression and using AI for research or iteration rather than the final deliverable.

Can AI output infringe someone else’s rights?

Yes, and the user who publishes it usually carries that exposure. An AI system can reproduce copyrighted material, imitate a protected character, or generate a mark confusingly similar to an existing one, and none of that becomes lawful because software produced it.

Litigation over training data is unsettled. Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence rejected a fair use defense in February 2025, while other 2025 decisions have found training on lawfully acquired material to be fair use, with several high profile cases still moving through appeals and settlements. Separately, state laws now restrict digital replicas of real people. Tennessee’s ELVIS Act, effective July 2024, targets unauthorized AI imitation of an artist’s voice, and California enacted digital replica legislation the same year. Cloning a celebrity voice for an ad is a distinct legal problem from the copyright question.

What contract terms does Braslow Legal recommend when vendors use AI?

Assume your agency or freelancer is using these tools and write the agreement accordingly rather than relying on a generic assignment clause that transfers rights the contractor may not hold.

• A disclosure obligation requiring written notice of which tools were used and on what portions of the deliverable
• Warranties that the deliverable does not infringe third party rights, backed by indemnification with a meaningful liability cap
• A prohibition on inputting your confidential information into public or consumer tier AI tools
• Acknowledgment that AI-generated elements may not be protectable, with a requirement that human authorship be documented

Check what your own AI vendor offers as well. Microsoft, Adobe, Google, and OpenAI have each published copyright indemnification commitments for enterprise customers, though they typically apply only to paid tiers and require that you leave the built-in content filters enabled.

Publishing AI-assisted work is a manageable risk once you know which pieces you own and which you merely possess. Document the human contribution, register what qualifies, disclose what the Copyright Office requires, and make your contracts do the work that copyright cannot. If your business is building products, campaigns, or creative assets with these tools, Braslow Legal can review your agreements and workflow before something goes out the door. Get in touch through the firm’s website.