Supreme Court lets copyright chief keep job for now
The justices left Shira Perlmutter in place, pausing Trump’s bid to fire the copyright chief as her office’s AI rulings loom over tech and executive power.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday left Shira Perlmutter in her post as the government’s top copyright official while she presses a legal challenge, blocking Donald Trump’s effort to remove her. The court’s unsigned order rejected the Justice Department’s request to lift a lower-court ruling that had kept Perlmutter at the U.S. Copyright Office, and the justices said the move was not a ruling on the merits.
Perlmutter has served since 2020 as register of copyrights and director of the U.S. Copyright Office, a post that carries responsibility for advising Congress on copyright policy. That role put her at the center of one of the sharpest fights in Washington over artificial intelligence, because the office has been weighing whether companies can lawfully use copyrighted works to train generative AI systems.
The Copyright Office sits within the Library of Congress. Its analysis found that some unauthorized uses of copyrighted works for AI training may be unlawful. The office launched its artificial intelligence initiative in early 2023, drew more than 10,000 comments after an August 2023 Federal Register notice, and then released Part 1 of its AI report on July 31, 2024, Part 2 on January 29, 2025, and a pre-publication version of Part 3 on May 9, 2025. In that third installment, training datasets containing copyrighted works clearly implicated the reproduction right, while some AI-training uses may qualify as fair use and others may not.
Perlmutter’s lawyers argue Trump moved to fire her because he disagreed with the report’s conclusions on AI. The Library of Congress oversees both the Copyright Office and the Congressional Research Service, and the administration also moved against Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, whom Barack Obama had sworn in on September 14, 2016 as the 14th Librarian of Congress and the first woman and first African American to hold the job.
The dispute has already moved through the lower courts. A district court declined to restore Perlmutter, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit put her back in the job. Judge Florence Pan wrote that executive interference with a legislative-branch official performing statutorily authorized duties to advise Congress raised a separation-of-powers concern.
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