Your AI-Generated Code Might Not Be Yours

If you use GitHub Copilot, Claude, Cursor or any other AI coding assistant to write production code, the legal ownership of what you ship is less settled than your licence agreement implies. The US Copyright Office ruled in January 2025 that purely AI-generated material is not copyrightable, and that prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to earn protection. Code you wrote with heavy AI assistance sits in an uncertain middle ground: it may be copyrightable, it may not, and no court has drawn the line for software. The answer-first version: you probably do not own copyright in the portions of your code that an AI wrote without substantial human direction, and you may not be able to prove where the boundary lies. This does not mean someone else owns it — it may be uncopyrightable altogether, like a phone book. But your employment contract, your client agreement and your open-source licence all assume you hold full copyright in your deliverables. That assumption is now an open question. The rule, plainly stated Purely AI-generated output is not copyrightable in the United States. This is not a prediction or a legal opinion; it is the stated position of the US Copyright Office, set out in its January 2025 report Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability . The report received over 10,000 public comments and represents the Office’s most comprehensive statement on the subject. Its conclusions are clear: “material generated wholly by AI is not copyrightable”, and existing law is adequate to handle the question without new legislation. The nuance sits in the middle ground — which is exactly where most AI-assisted coding lives. What the Copyright Office said The report draws several lines. First, it confirms the long-standing requirement that copyright requires a human author. An AI system cannot be an author, regardless of how sophisticated its output. Second, it addresses prompts: “based on the functioning of current generally available