How to Register AI-Generated Works for Copyright

To register AI-generated works for copyright, file through the U.S. Copyright Office’s Electronic Copyright Office (eCO) portal, disclose any more-than-trivial AI-generated content on the application, and claim only the parts you personally authored. The Office will register the work, but the certificate will limit protection to your human contribution. Everything the AI produced sits outside the copyright.

What You Can Actually Claim

Copyright in the United States protects only what a human being created. The Copyright Office confirmed this in its March 2023 registration guidance, and it applies squarely to generative AI: when a system produces text, images, or audio in response to your prompts, the output itself is not yours to claim.¹

Writing detailed prompts does not change that. The Copyright Office’s January 2025 report states that copyright may be available when a human-authored work is perceptible inside the AI output, or when a person creatively arranges or modifies the output, but not through “the mere provision of prompts.”²

There is a meaningful line between generative AI and assistive tools. Spell checkers, grammar tools, basic photo filters, and auto-tune polish work you already made. Using them raises no authorship question. Generative systems that produce new expressive material are different, and the Office treats their output as machine-generated unless a human shaped the expression in a substantial way.²

The Copyright Office’s 2023 decision on the graphic novel Zarya of the Dawn shows how this plays out. The Office registered the author’s text and her overall selection and arrangement of images and words, but stripped protection from the individual Midjourney images inside the book, finding that her edits to those images were too minor to count as new authorship.³

The practical read: if you wrote the text or created the underlying art yourself and used AI only for technical cleanup, the whole work is likely registrable. If AI generated substantial creative content and you curated or arranged it, you can register the arrangement but not the AI pieces. If AI did the creative work and you just picked what you liked, there may be nothing to register.

Your Duty to Disclose

Applicants have an affirmative obligation to reveal AI involvement and to briefly describe what the human contributed.¹

The duty kicks in when AI-generated content is more than de minimis. The Office does not set a precise threshold. It applies the same standard used for preexisting material: brief quotes and short phrases don’t need to be disclaimed, but anything beyond that does. If you can’t tell whether your use crosses the line, include a general statement that the work contains AI-generated material, and the examiner will follow up. Sometimes the examiner will conclude the use raises no authorship question at all.⁴

When in doubt, disclose. Honest disclosure narrows what the certificate covers; hiding involvement can void the registration entirely.

Filling Out the Application

Registration runs through the eCO portal using a Standard Application. Two fields carry most of the weight for AI-involved works.

In the Author Created field, describe what you personally made. Be specific. “Text of chapters 1 through 12” or “arrangement and selection of visual and textual elements” tells the examiner exactly what you are claiming. Vague descriptions invite follow-up questions that slow the process down.

In the Limitation of Claim, Material Excluded section, identify the AI-generated portions you are not claiming. Clear language works best: “artwork generated by artificial intelligence” or “AI-generated text in sections 3 and 7.” That formally removes the material from your copyright.

You’ll also upload a deposit copy of the work. The Office accepts common formats, including .pdf, .docx, and .txt for text and .jpg, .png, .tif, and .gif for images.⁵

Before you start, put together a record of your creative process: the prompts you used, the iterations you ran, and the specific edits or arrangements you made. None of this gets uploaded, but if the examiner asks about your role, a detailed log makes the response easy. Note which paragraphs you wrote from scratch, which images you composed versus selected from AI options, and what modifications you made along the way.

Review the summary screen carefully before paying. Once the fee posts, changes are limited.

Fees and Processing Times

Fees depend on the application type. A single-author electronic filing where the author is also the claimant and the work is not made for hire costs $45. The Standard Application, which covers multiple authors or more complex ownership, costs $65. Paper filings on traditional forms cost $125.⁶

Processing times reported by the Copyright Office for October 2025 through March 2026:

Online filing with digital deposit, no follow-up: about 3.6 months on average (roughly 2 to 5.3 months).
Online filing with digital deposit, examiner correspondence required: about 5 months on average (roughly 1.6 to 8.3 months).
Online filing with a mailed physical deposit, no follow-up: about 4.4 months.
Paper application by mail: 6.3 months without correspondence, 8.1 months with it.

AI-involved claims are more likely to trigger examiner correspondence than routine filings, so plan for the longer end. The overall average across all claim types is 4.1 months.⁷

After You Submit

You’ll get a confirmation email with a service request number for tracking. An examiner then reviews your disclosure against the human authorship standards. If it isn’t clear how much creative control you exercised, the Office will send an inquiry. Respond promptly. If you don’t, the application can be closed without a refund.

If the claim is approved, the Office issues a certificate of registration. For works with AI content, the certificate typically carries an annotation limiting protection to the human-authored elements. The AI-generated portions stay unprotected. That is the expected outcome of honest disclosure, and it does not weaken the protection covering what you did create.

The effective date of your registration is not the day the certificate arrives. It is the day the Copyright Office received your complete application, deposit, and fee, assuming the claim is ultimately accepted.⁸

Fixing a Registration That Didn’t Disclose AI

If you registered a work and later realize you didn’t disclose AI-generated content, file a supplementary registration to correct the record. Identify the original registration number and year, describe your human contribution in the Author Created field, and disclaim the AI-generated material in Material Excluded. The Office issues a new supplementary certificate with a disclaimer covering the AI content. Both the original and supplementary records stay on file, each with its own effective date.⁴

The supplementary registration must be certified by the author, the copyright claimant, an owner of exclusive rights, or an authorized agent.⁹ The current electronic filing fee is $100.⁶

If Your Registration Is Refused

A refusal is not final. The Copyright Office has a two-level administrative appeal. After the written refusal, you have three months to file a first request for reconsideration with the Registration Program. If that is denied, you have another three months to file a second request with the Copyright Review Board, a three-member panel led by the Register of Copyrights and the General Counsel or their designees.¹⁰

Each request carries a fee and requires a written argument explaining why the work qualifies. The Board’s ruling on a second request is final agency action. Judicial review in federal court is possible but expensive and rarely pursued for a single work.

For AI-involved works, refusals usually turn on an insufficient showing of human creative control. This is where the process record described earlier does the most work: iterative prompting, manual edits, and creative choices, laid out in detail.

Why Hiding AI Involvement Backfires

Trying to secure a cleaner-looking registration by omitting the AI is a bad trade. The Copyright Office can cancel a registration outright if it later finds that information essential to the registrability decision was omitted or misrepresented.⁴

The exposure gets worse in court. Under federal law, a court can disregard your registration in an infringement suit if it finds you knowingly included inaccurate information on the application and accurate information would have caused the Office to refuse registration. The court is required to ask the Register of Copyrights whether accurate disclosure would have changed the outcome.¹¹

At the far end, knowingly making a materially false statement to a federal agency is itself a crime, carrying penalties of up to five years in prison.¹² Prosecution over a copyright application is uncommon. The realistic risk is that the registration collapses when you most need it, in the middle of trying to enforce your rights. A registration built on honest disclosure, narrower certificate and all, is worth far more than one that can be undone.

1
Federal Register. Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence
2
U.S. Copyright Office. Copyright Office Releases Part 2 of Artificial Intelligence Report
3
U.S. Copyright Office. Zarya of the Dawn Letter
4
U.S. Copyright Office. Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence
5
U.S. Copyright Office. eCO Acceptable File Types
6
U.S. Copyright Office. Fees
7
U.S. Copyright Office. Registration Processing Times FAQs
8
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 USC 410 – Registration of Claim and Issuance of Certificate
9
U.S. Copyright Office. Supplementary Registration
10
eCFR. 37 CFR 202.5 – Reconsideration Procedure for Refusals to Register
11
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 USC 411 – Registration and Civil Infringement Actions
12
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 1001 – Statements or Entries Generally