Who owns what AI makes?

A friend opens a bakery and makes her logo with an artificial intelligence (AI) image tool. It takes about five minutes, and she loves it so much that she wants it on every box, bag, and sign in the shop. Then a thought stops her. If another shop copied it, could she do anything about it? That comes down to who, if anyone, counts as the author. In the United States (US), as of October 2026, the answer looks like this.

Copyright is the legal right to stop other people from copying a creative work. In the US, it has long protected only work made by a human author. A photo you take or a song you write can be protected the moment you create it. The US Copyright Office, the government agency that registers creative works, says that rule still holds when AI is involved.¹²

In January 2025, the Office published a report on exactly this question. Its view is that prompts alone don't give a person enough control over what comes out. You can type "a round logo, warm colors, a loaf of bread." But the tool decides the lines, the shapes, and the layout, and those choices are the creative part. So even a long, careful prompt doesn't make you the author of the picture. The machine made the expressive choices, and the law asks for a person's.¹

Your own choices can still count. The report names four kinds of human contribution that can be protected.

• Your own work used as a starting point, like a sketch you drew, when it still shows in the result.
• Changes you make to the output that are creative in their own right.
• The way you select and arrange pieces, such as which images go in a book and in what order.
• A prompt itself, if it's creative enough, though the picture it produced stays unprotected.

So if your friend had drawn the loaf herself, then reworked the result by hand, she'd have a stronger claim than if she typed a sentence and kept the first image.¹

A lot of real work ends up mixed. A children's book might pair a person's story with AI pictures. In a case like that, the parts a person made can be protected, and the AI-made parts are left out of the claim. When you register a work like that, the Copyright Office asks you to say which parts the AI made.¹²

There's a second question hiding in here. Many image tools' terms of service say you own what you make, or that you may use it however you like. Those terms are a contract between you and the company. Copyright is a separate matter. The Copyright Alliance, a nonprofit group for creators, puts it simply: when a work is made only by AI, no one can own the copyright, because the work is in the public domain, free for anyone to use. So the terms tell you what you're allowed to do. Copyright is about what you can stop others from doing.⁴

That's the US picture. Other countries set their own rules. The United Kingdom, for example, has long had a separate rule for computer-generated works, and its government has proposed removing it. Courts and lawmakers can change the picture anywhere, which is why this topic is checked every few months.³

If a logo or an ad matters to your business, an intellectual property lawyer can tell you what you'd need to protect it. For anything you make with AI that you care about, ask yourself one question first. Which parts of it did a person decide?