Who Owns the Copyright in AI-Generated Content?

In the EU and France, probably nobody, if the content was generated without meaningful human creative input. EU copyright requires a work to be the author's own intellectual creation, reflecting free and creative choices, and French droit d'auteur requires an œuvre de l'esprit bearing the imprint of its author's personality. Both tests are built around a human author, so purely machine-generated output is unlikely to attract copyright at all. The consequence is that it is unowned rather than owned by the AI provider or by you, which means there may be nothing to stop a competitor from copying it.

AI-assisted work is a different question. Where a person selects, arranges, edits and shapes the material, the resulting work can be protected, but protection attaches to the human contribution rather than to everything the model produced. A detailed prompt is generally not enough on its own, because the creative choices have to be reflected in the work itself. The UK is currently an outlier: section 9(3) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 gives authorship of a computer-generated work to the person who made the arrangements necessary for its creation, though the UK Government proposed removing that provision in its March 2026 report on copyright and AI. In the US, the Copyright Office requires human authorship and has refused registration for output generated without it.

Contracts do not solve this, which is the point most often missed. A provider can only assign rights that exist, so a clause purporting to give you ownership of unprotected output gives you nothing enforceable against a third party who copies it. If an asset matters commercially, either build in genuine human creative input and keep a record of what was contributed, or protect it through another route such as trade marks, design rights, confidentiality or contractual restrictions on your own customers. For anything central to your brand or product, it is far cheaper to check the position before the asset is in the market than after someone has copied it.