Purely AI-generated code has no author and no copyright under US law

Who owns the code? AI code == no author == no copyright

This site walks founders and engineering leads through a hard legal reality: under current US copyright law, code generated entirely by AI has no human author, so it can't be copyrighted or defended as an owned asset. It cites four settled anchors—including the Supreme Court's March 2026 denial of cert in Thaler and the first rejection of a fair-use defense for AI training in Thomson Reuters v. Ross—to show the rule is already locked in. It also breaks down four common blind spots: pure AI output isn't yours, vibe coding where the AI makes creative choices leaves code unprotected, mixed codebases only protect the human-authored parts, and open-source licenses are unenforceable on code no one owns. The post doesn't offer fixes; it's a risk primer with a self-assessment quiz.

Why it matters: This piece connects four settled U.S. copyright rulings into one clear takeaway: purely AI-generated code has no author and therefore no copyright. For teams shipping heavily AI-assisted code daily, this is an overlooked but high-stakes legal reality. Not scored higher because...