This article explains the general landscape as of mid-2026. It's written to help you understand the shape of the issue β it isn't legal advice, laws vary by country and continue to evolve, and you should talk to a qualified lawyer for anything that depends on your specific situation. The authoritative, current source for what this platform itself allows is always our Terms of Service.
"Can I use this commercially?" is actually two different questions that get conflated constantly:
- Does the platform's terms of service let me use what I generate for business purposes?
- Do I own a copyright in it that stops other people from copying it?
They have different answers, and only one of them is something a platform can decide on its own.
Question one: what the platform allows
Per this platform's Terms of Service, you retain rights to the content you create and store through the service β the platform takes a limited license only to operate the product for you (storage, delivery, and so on), not a license to use your generations for its own purposes. In plain terms: what you generate is yours to use, including commercially, subject to the current terms. Always check the live Terms of Service page for the exact, up-to-date language rather than relying on a summary β terms can be updated, and that page is the source of truth.
Question two: what copyright law says
This is the genuinely unsettled part, and it's worth understanding rather than guessing at.
In the United States, both the Copyright Office and the courts have held that copyright protects only material that reflects human authorship. A prompt alone β no matter how detailed or carefully engineered β has consistently not been treated as enough human creative control to make the resulting output copyrightable on its own. In March 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to this position, leaving the existing rule in place: purely AI-generated output, without meaningful human creative control over the final expressive choices, cannot be registered for copyright in the US.
That said, "purely AI-generated" is a narrower category than most real workflows. When you meaningfully edit, arrange, combine, inpaint specific regions, or curate and modify AI output as part of a larger human-directed work, the human-authored elements and the overall arrangement can qualify for copyright protection β you just can't claim protection over the raw, unedited machine output itself. If you plan to register a work that includes AI-generated material, current U.S. guidance expects you to identify and disclaim the AI-generated parts.
Other countries don't all follow the same rule. Some jurisdictions have separate provisions for computer-generated works with no direct human author; others are still actively developing their position. If this matters for a specific project β especially one crossing borders β that's a question for a lawyer licensed where you operate, not a generic article.
Why this distinction matters practically
Here's the part that surprises people: you can generally still use and even sell AI-generated content commercially, whether or not it's copyrightable. Copyrightability mainly determines whether you can stop someone else from copying your exact output β it doesn't determine whether you're allowed to use it in an ad, a product listing, a social post or a client deliverable. Most everyday commercial uses of generated images and video don't hinge on copyright registration at all.
Where it does matter is defensibility: if a competitor lifts your exact generated asset and you have no meaningfully human-authored contribution to point to, your legal options are narrower than they'd be with traditionally created work. For high-stakes campaign assets, that's a reason to make sure a human is doing real creative work on top of the raw generation β editing, compositing, art-directing β not just a reason to avoid AI tools.
Things to watch out for regardless of copyright status
A few risks sit entirely outside the copyright question and apply no matter what:
- Recognizable real people. Generating a likeness of a real, identifiable person β especially a public figure β can raise publicity-rights and likeness issues that are separate from copyright and often stricter.
- Trademarks and branded characters. A generated image that includes someone else's logo, mascot or distinctive branded design can create trademark problems even if the image itself is "yours."
- Underlying model provider policies. The usage policies of the model providers behind the platform's tools (Google, OpenAI, and the other studios covered in our video model comparison) can carry their own restrictions on certain categories of content β these flow through regardless of what the hosting platform's own terms say.
The short version
- Using generations commercially: governed by this platform's Terms of Service, which grants you rights to what you create β read the current page for exact terms.
- Owning a copyright in raw AI output: currently not recognized in the US without meaningful human creative authorship on top of it; other countries vary.
- Practical risk: usually comes from depicting real people or existing brands, not from the AI-generation step itself.
When in doubt on anything jurisdiction-specific or high-stakes, a short conversation with an actual lawyer is worth far more than any blog post β including this one.