USCO Standard

How to Disclose AI Use on a Copyright Application

By Nora Whitfield · August 7, 2026

The US Copyright Office doesn't care about your tool. They care about your hand. If you used a machine to generate the expressive parts of your work, you won't get a registration for those parts. Period.

You might think you can slide an AI-generated image or block of text past the examiners. Don't. The Copyright Office is currently obsessed with weeding out non-human authorship. If you submit an application, you have to be honest about what you made and what the algorithm made. Failing to do that is a great way to have your registration canceled later.

Why disclosure matters

The law says copyright protects human-authored works. This isn't a new rule. It's the core of the Copyright Act. We saw this play out in Thaler v. Perlmutter, where the court confirmed that a work created by AI without any human input cannot be copyrighted. The Office needs to know if your work meets the human authorship requirement.

When you fill out your copyright application, you're signing a document under penalty of perjury. If you lie about the origins of your work, you're not just risking a rejected application. You're risking the validity of your entire copyright. If you ever sue someone for infringement, your opponent will dig into your original application. If they find you hid your AI use, they'll use that to argue your registration is fraudulent. That could cost you the chance to collect statutory damages, which are fixed cash penalties that range from $750 to $30,000 per work. In some cases, those damages can go much higher.

When you must disclose

You don't need to report every single tool you use. If you used a spellchecker, a grammar tool, or a basic photo filter, the Office doesn't consider that AI-generated. You're fine. You need to disclose AI use when the machine did the creative heavy lifting.

Think about Zarya of the Dawn. In that case, the author used Midjourney to create the images for her comic book. She disclosed it. The Office granted her copyright for the arrangement and the text, but they refused to cover the individual images themselves. Because she was honest, she kept the protection for the parts she actually curated and arranged. If she had tried to claim the AI images were her own work, the whole registration might have been tossed.

If you generate a full image or a long paragraph of prose using a prompt, you have to list the AI as a source of content. You're not asking for permission to use AI. You're clarifying which parts of your work are eligible for protection.

How to fill out the form

Start your registration at copyright.gov. The filing fee is usually around $65 for a standard application. Once you reach the section for the work description, look for the "Author Created" field. This is where you tell the Office exactly what you did.

If you used AI, you need to be specific. Don't just write "I used AI." That's too vague. Write something like "Text authored by human, except for sections 4 and 5 which were generated by AI." Or "Images created by human, with AI-generated background elements."

Next, move to the "Limitation of Claim" section. This is the most important part of the form. You will see a box for "Material Excluded." This is where you identify the AI-generated content that you are not claiming. You should write something like "AI-generated text" or "AI-generated images."

Then, use the "New Material Included" box to explain what you actually contributed. Use simple language. Say "Human-authored text and arrangement of images." Be precise. You are drawing a line between your human labor and the machine output. The examiner wants to see that line clearly.

The review process

After you submit, the Office might email you. They often send a request for more information if they suspect AI was involved but you didn't explain it well. Don't panic. They might ask for a description of your creative process. They want to know if you exercised "creative control" over the AI output.

Did you write the prompts? Did you edit the result? Did you combine AI pieces with your own original work? Explain how you directed the machine. The Office is looking for human intent. If you just typed a one-sentence prompt and hit enter, the Office will likely view that as the AI doing the work, not you. If you iterated on the prompts and spent hours modifying the output, you have a better argument for human authorship of the final product.

The Office isn't trying to punish you for using tools. They are trying to preserve the boundary between human art and automated output. If you treat them as an adversary, you lose. If you treat them as a clerk who just needs to know what to exclude from the public record, you can usually get your registration handled without a headache.

Keep your records clean

You have a 3-month window from the date of publication to register your work for the best legal protection. Don't wait until you're being sued to figure out how you made your work. Keep a log of your process. Save your prompts. Save the versions of the work you edited.

If you get a rejection, it’s not the end of the world. It just means the specific work you submitted didn't meet the threshold of human authorship in the eyes of the examiner. You can't copyright the AI parts, but you can always copyright the parts you wrote, painted, or designed yourself.

Focus on the human spark. If you can't point to where you made a creative choice that defined the final result, you're going to have a hard time getting a registration. Be honest about the machine's role, and you'll protect the parts of your work that actually belong to you.

Check your current registration strategy against our methodology guide to see if you are leaving your work vulnerable to invalidation. Use the Copyrightable hook to keep track of your human-authored contributions from day one of your next project.