AI architecture copyright: who owns AI-assisted drawings?

Your designers may already generate floor plan options, renderings and massing studies with AI tools. When a client asks who owns those drawings, or a competitor copies a design, the answer depends on AI architecture copyright rules that a federal appeals court and the Copyright Office clarified in 2025. Here is what a principal needs to know about ownership, registration and owner-architect agreements.

Can AI-generated architecture drawings be copyrighted?

No, not the parts an AI tool produced on its own. U.S. copyright law protects only work created by a human author, and material an AI tool generates from a prompt does not qualify. Only the human contribution to an AI-assisted drawing can be protected.

The courts settled the core question in Thaler v. Perlmutter. Stephen Thaler applied to register an image and listed his AI system as its sole author. The Copyright Office refused, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld that refusal on March 18, 2025, holding that the Copyright Act requires a human author. The Supreme Court denied review on March 2, 2026, so the appellate ruling stands.

The Copyright Office then addressed the harder middle ground in its January 2025 report, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability. The Office concluded that prompts alone do not give a person enough control over the output to count as authorship, even detailed prompts refined over many rounds. It also concluded that using AI as a tool does not by itself remove protection. Human expression that remains perceptible in the output, such as a firm's own sketch or massing model fed into a rendering tool, can still be protected. So can a person's creative selection, arrangement or modification of AI output. The Office said these questions are decided case by case.

For a design firm, that means ownership follows the record of what a person on the team actually designed.

Which parts of an AI-assisted design can a firm still protect?

A firm can protect the design decisions its architects made and the drawings that record them. Copyright treats a building design and the drawings that depict it as two separate works, and both depend on human authorship.

Under 17 U.S.C. 101, an architectural work is "the design of a building as embodied in any tangible medium of expression, including a building, architectural plans, or drawings." The Copyright Office's Circular 41 explains that protection covers the overall form of the building and the arrangement of its spaces. It does not cover standard features such as windows and doors, common configurations, or purely functional elements such as construction techniques. The circular also states that an architectural work and a technical drawing of it are separate works that need separate registrations.

Apply that to a typical AI workflow. A plugin that generates floor plan options from a program brief produces raw output that, on its own, has no human author. When a designer selects one option, reworks the layout, and develops it into the design the client approves, the human choices in that final design are the protectable part. The generated options that nobody touched remain unprotected, so the firm has no copyright claim to them.

Two limits apply to every architectural work, AI or not. Section 120 lets anyone make photographs or other pictures of a constructed building visible from a public place. It also lets the building's owner alter or demolish it without the architect's consent.

Do you have to disclose AI-generated material when registering a design?

Yes, if the work includes AI-generated material. The Copyright Office's registration guidance, published at 88 FR 16190 on March 16, 2023, says applicants have a duty to disclose AI-generated content in a work submitted for registration and must briefly describe the human author's contributions.

AI-generated material that is more than de minimis should be excluded in the application's "Limitation of the Claim" section. If a firm already registered a work without disclosing AI material, the guidance says the applicant should correct the public record with a supplementary registration. Most firms do not register every project, but those that register signature designs or technical drawings should update their registration practice before the next filing.

Who owns AI-assisted drawings, the firm or the client?

The owner-architect agreement decides, but only for rights that exist. A contract can assign or license the firm's rights in a design. It cannot create copyright in material no human authored.

By default, the author owns the copyright, and for drawings produced by employees within the scope of their jobs, the firm is the author as a work made for hire under 17 U.S.C. 101. Drawings a firm prepares for a client are generally not works made for hire for that client, because commissioned work fits that category only in specific listed types and only with a signed written agreement. Moving ownership to the client requires a transfer in writing signed by the owner under 17 U.S.C. 204. Many owner-architect agreements keep copyright in the instruments of service with the architect and give the client a license to use them for the project.

AI creates two practical problems in these agreements. First, a firm that promises to transfer or warrant ownership of "all deliverables" may be promising rights in AI-generated portions that do not exist. Second, some clients add AI clauses to their agreements, such as notice requirements or bans on AI tools touching their project files. The counsel review list below covers both.

What do AI vendor terms and existing designs add to the risk?

Vendor terms decide what the vendor can do with your files, and the output can still raise infringement questions. Neither issue is settled by copyright registration.

Many AI vendors state that the customer owns its inputs and outputs. That language allocates whatever rights exist between you and the vendor. It does not make machine-generated output copyrightable. The terms that matter more for a design firm are whether uploaded drawings are retained, used for model training, or visible to the vendor's staff. Those terms vary between free consumer accounts and paid business accounts of the same product.

Output can also resemble existing protected designs. A firm that delivers a design is responsible for it regardless of which tool produced the first draft, so the same review a licensed professional applies to any design should cover AI-generated options. California firms should also keep their responsible control record for anything that will carry a stamp.

What should an AEC firm do this quarter?

Start with a record of where AI touches design work, then make the human authorship visible. These steps fit inside a normal quarter:

• Inventory every AI tool in the design workflow, including plugins for Revit, AutoCAD and Bluebeam, rendering tools and AI features built into existing platforms.
• Confirm each approved tool runs on a business account whose terms keep uploads private and out of model training. Our guide to AI tools for architects covers the controls.
• Keep the human design record: sketches, model versions, markups and the decisions that turned AI options into the final design. Version history in your file platform is the easiest evidence to retain.
• Note in the project record which deliverables include AI-generated material, so registration filings and client questions can be answered accurately.
• Pull your owner-architect agreement template and any incoming client contracts with AI clauses for the counsel review described below.
• Add a short IP section to your firm AI policy that tells staff which tools are approved and which client projects prohibit AI use.

What should your counsel review before AI-assisted drawings go to a client?

Do this review before you sign the next owner-architect agreement or file a registration for a design that includes AI-generated material. Bring these items:

• Ownership and transfer terms: whether your agreement assigns copyright or licenses the instruments of service, whether any transfer meets the signed-writing requirement in 17 U.S.C. 204(a), and whether a client's AI clause changes either. Bring your owner-architect template, recent signed agreements and any client AI clauses.
• Ownership warranties: whether you warrant ownership of all deliverables when some portions are AI-generated and unprotectable under the Copyright Office's January 2025 copyrightability report. Bring the warranty and indemnity clauses and your AI tool inventory.
• Registration filings: what to list as excluded AI-generated material, and whether past registrations need a supplementary registration under 88 FR 16190. Bring your registration records and the project's AI-use notes.

How does s90 help design firms with this?

s90 manages the technology side of this work for architecture, engineering and construction firms. We help approve and configure AI tools on business terms, block unapproved tools on design workstations, apply data loss prevention to project files, and keep version history and audit logs so your firm can show what its people designed and when. If your team is adding AI to its design workflow, we are happy to review where it fits today.