Ownership of AI-Assisted Work

Short Answer

Ownership of AI-assisted work has two parts. Copyright protects only human authorship: the Copyright Office’s January 2025 report concluded that prompts alone generally do not make a person the author of an AI output, while human selection, arrangement and modification can be protected, and the courts have refused to register a work claimed to be authored by an AI system. Patents require human inventors, and the USPTO’s revised guidance of November 2025 addresses AI-assisted inventions. The second part is contract: vendor terms usually assign or license outputs to the user, and employment and contractor agreements decide whether the business or the individual owns the human contribution. Because the protectable part may be thin, businesses often rely on contracts and trade secret protection as well. Texas IP Law covers copyright and patent doctrine in depth.

Which Laws Apply

Texas AI-specific: none.

Generally applicable Texas law: contract law; employee and contractor assignment agreements; TUTSA.

Federal: Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 102; Patent Act, 35 U.S.C. § 100 and 115; USPTO guidance, 90 Fed. Reg. 54,636 (Nov. 28, 2025).

Copyright

The Copyright Office’s Part 2 report on copyrightability (January 2025) concluded that outputs generated by AI from prompts generally lack human authorship, that expressive human contributions perceptible in the output can be protected, and that creative selection, arrangement or modification of AI material can be protected. In Thaler v. Perlmutter, the D.C. Circuit affirmed refusal to register a work listing an AI system as author, and the Supreme Court denied review on March 2, 2026.

Patents

The USPTO’s revised inventorship guidance, 90 Fed. Reg. 54,636 (Nov. 28, 2025), replaced its 2024 guidance on AI-assisted inventions. Inventorship remains limited to natural persons. See Texas IP Law’s AI inventorship Insight.

Contracts

Read the AI vendor’s terms on outputs: most assign or license outputs to the customer, some reserve rights to use outputs or similar outputs for others, and few warrant that outputs do not infringe. Employment agreements and contractor agreements should assign the human contribution to AI-assisted work to the business and require disclosure of AI use where ownership or registration matters.

Illustrative Example (Hypothetical)

A Texas agency delivers a logo that its designer created by refining dozens of AI generations. Copyright may protect the designer’s modifications but not the underlying generated elements. The client’s protection rests on the agency agreement’s assignment, a warranty about AI use and trademark registration of the final mark.

What Is Unsettled

How much human modification makes an AI output protectable; whether training on copyrighted works is fair use, which is being litigated in several courts and is covered on Texas IP Law.