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In the United States the Copyright Office actually has guidance on this that I feel most people aren’t aware of.

https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

An excerpt, with emphasis mine:

• Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law, without the need for legislative change.

• The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output.

• Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material.

• Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.

• Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.

• Based on the functioning of current generally available technology, prompts do not alone provide sufficient control.

• Human authors are entitled to copyright in their works of authorship that are perceptible in AI-generated outputs, as well as the creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of material in the outputs, or creative modifications of the outputs.

• The case has not been made for additional copyright or sui generis protection for AI- generated content.

I am sure there will be many more legal battles and probably legislation about this to come.

By this logic, shouldn't any code using an open-source framework or language also be open source? Even before AI, devs learned from Stack Overflow and plenty of open source code.

You're confusing writing code with software engineering. Devs never just wrote code, they took ownership of the outcome. Business owners put their money on the line for product decisions.

To say that just because devs or founders use AI to write code, the code is no longer their intellectual property is ridiculous. Humans take responsibility for the outcome and are willing to accept the losses. AI can't do that. AI doesn't have any stakes in the output it generates, humans do.

My two cents. I'm on both sides of this (as I'm sure many here are): AI was trained on my open-source code. Also I use AI to build proprietary code.

My stance is that AI is a tool, like a compiler is a tool. AI generated code should not be considered public domain or forced to be open source or ineligible for copyright.

Even if AI writes every line, the direction and engineering that I put in has been substantial (current project in mind), months of heavy AI use for heavy refinement and direction of complex software. That human input, even if it isn't lines of code, counts for a lot.

Furthermore, what does society gain from my code being made open source if anybody else could just themselves go to Claude Code and ask for the same thing? Just go have Claude make one for you. Is it the token cost barrier? That is IMHO negligible compared to the value that we are getting out of AI right now. We are in a golden moment, anybody can create amazing things, rapidly, at low cost and little barrier to entry.

I am the author of multiple AGPL systems, many in mainstream use. Early LLM models would spit out my code almost verbatim. Modern systems borrow heavily on the creative design of those systems.

One company first pirated my AGPL code (e.g. shipped it without my name, copyright notices, source availability, etc.). I sent them violation notices. After many months of fighting, they had an LLM clone the system. The LLM clone feels:

a) Buggy and bad compared to my code

b) Still, like it's basically my creative content

It's as if you asked an LLM to rewrite Harry Potter, with the same plot, but bad dialogue.

Doe v. GitHub already decided (I'm simplifying, read the actual thing yourself) that LLM output is not automatically open source - or specifically it doesn't infringe on the open source training material and doesn't inherit the oss copyright notice.

Thaler v. Perlmutter (again simplified) showed 100% AI output can't be given any copyright.

The directions the current cases are going are very much opposed to that idea and I wouldn't expect things to change in the opposite direction.

I think we need to go one level up in the law, and recognize that existing models of copyright and ownership simply don’t apply here, and come up with something new.

There is an undeniable core mathematical principle that should be recognized in law somehow: the emergent capabilities of LLMs are not possible without, effectively, the entire recorded intellectual output of human civilization since the dawn of recorded history as training data.

Trying to determine who “owns” that data, or each individual piece of it, leads us to insane distortions like LLM labs scanning and destroying books. Nobody, including the labs, thinks this is the best solution, but they’re doing it to comply with today’s interpretation of the law.

The reality is that if we are considering the entire corpus of training data, we all own it. We’re not really talking about who owns one book. We’re talking about who can be said to own all the knowledge in all the books. Who can be said to own the existence of books, or the conditions of civilization that cause us to value and preserve books in general.

The preservation and archiving of knowledge that enabled the emergence of LLMs is the product of a system of social relations that belong to the entire civilization. It is a commons. And when we talk about the future impact of these systems, we’re generally talking about taking the value of that commons, and concentrating the value of it in the hands of about a dozen people.

To me, there is no other way to think about a situation like that, where a tiny handful of people realize all the surplus value latent in the entire intellectual inheritance of human civilization, as anything other than theft.

One-off settlements with individual rights holders don't fix that. Neither does scrambling the output of LLMs so that they don’t reproduce their training data verbatim. I don’t think making LLM output non-copyrightable, or all LLM output open source, fixes it either.

I think we need to establish an entirely new framework for thinking about this stuff, and then go forward from there.

The article contradicts itself.

It's important to remember that the purpose of the license is to allow the copyright owner to exercise their rights in a manner they deem fit. Even if they choose to give the code away, that choice is captured in the form of a specifically worded license (MIT, BSD, etc.).

This means that licenses exist because code is copyrightable in the first place, with the license governing the use of said copyright. If AI code is not copyrightable, then no license can govern it.

I really have to wonder what context this person is operating in. The vast majority of software written in the world is proprietary, written for a company to aid some business process, and ridiculously specific to its use case, and freely intermixed with proprietary business information.

“Open sourcing” is not just a legal state, it’s an affirmative act that takes work to prepare the codebase for public consumption. Saying that all the weird business code in the world should be involuntarily publicized is an incoherent concept. What precisely would OP expect to happen in a world that adhered to their opinion? Because to be clear, 90%+ of all code being written today is LLM-generated, so OP suggests that companies should no longer have any privacy wrt their internal software, all LLM code just gets yeeted into the public. How could that possibly work?

Given how easy it is to write software now, this perspective seems to overindex on a past state of the world that no longer applies.

Kind of a silly position. I mean, if it's you're code verbatim, then yeah, it's a violation. Shouldn't be allowed. But like... it saw open-source code and therefore all output must be open source? I don't know about that.

Here's where I can get on board. I think people should be putting AI to work to improve everyone's lives for free. Your version of "should" is like "we should make this a law." My version of "should" is more like a moral recommendation -- we should be using as much of our subscriptions as possible to benefit everyone instead of enriching a handful of people. I view it as a natural extension of the spirit of free software to begin with. Software should be free (as in freedom), and we finally have enough development power to make real headway on that.

Strongly disagree.

Just because AI was involved doesn’t mean significant human thought and effort didn’t go into the production of those artifacts.

My agentic software development loop requires heavy involvement of real-world feedback. The ratio is huge. 20 mins of agentic software coding against hours or days of testing, trying it out, real-world contact, thinking about what feature is next or what tweak would make it more usable, smooth, intuitive. That feedback is baked into the product. Forcing it to be open source steals all that time and effort for me, and takes from me the decision as to how and whether to open-source it. So you mean the code that I’ve agentically written to help manage my private financial affairs (on local models, for privacy) or my kids’ complicated school schedules must now be open sourced?

My manners begin to fail, so I’ll stop here.

I have some projects I've been working on over a year. Sitting down working making design decisions. Research. Using ai doesn't mean I did no work. It doesn't matter if the ai was trained. I still did work.

I don't understand this view point. Using ai and making high quality stuff is not pushing a button. Its hard. It takes real effort and diligence. And you have to pay actual money out of pocket to deliver it.

Well, standard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

That being said...

I can kind of buy the argument that we humans were trained on open source code when we read it... and then many of us went on to write closed source code. I would also, say, however, that any laws we had in place never expected a single entity to "read" the entire output of human civilization. But that's not really the point I want to make.

The point I really want to make is this:

IF we accept that what the AI companies did when they consumed the entire internet for training was legal (or even ethical)...

Then I fail to see how training other models via distillation of their models is ANYTHING BUT legal (or even ethical)...

This article is mostly ragebait, and it's claim is hollow when looked thru the lens of computing history.

Let us skip the whole Bell Labs C/C++/unix/sh/ksh -> BSD csh/vi/bsd/tcp/ip, and other proprietary unix variants/utils and focus instead on today's landscape.

There are two axes we can partition the whole ecosystem. Free/OpenBSD, Clang/LLVM, musl, busybox, X11/Xlib, sqlite, postgresql, nginx, Python, Go, Rust, many embedded rtos, vendor sdk, utilities etc.. and then there is Linux/GCC/glibc, etc. Along the licensing spectrum there is GPL and then the rest of the permissive licenses MIT/BSD/Apache etc where source code publishing is not a requirement.

These permissive license offerings are more prevalent compared to the GPL offerings and as such one can gain all the knowledge needed to build a fully functional system. LLM could memorize, or copy the pattern, so even though it is not a clean room, courts seem to be ok as long as things are not spit out verbatim.

Add to this, the fact the there are tons of research articles, user manuals, RFCs, so one can learn and understand how to build the needed reusable component if small and give their own prompt (and bugs) and and let LLM do as user described.

In the US, purely AI-generated code isn’t copyrightable, but it also doesn’t mean you have to publish it. Also, putting an open-source license on code nobody holds a copyright to has no legal effect. So, ethically or otherwise, there is no strong and convincing argument that open sourcing is the right thing to do.

What 'creators' could do is to compile a list of all the frequently used permissive licenses that are applicable to their system and just make it part of their software license attribution.

[1] https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2026/03/25/open-source-licensing...

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.15533

Whilst the first training sets would have used Stack overflow and open source projects.

I have my suspicions that the AI companies have been using reverse engineering to gain more training data.

Ethics don't really concern these companies so...

When you have essentially infinite compute and are constantly looking for more training data. To me the next logical step is to start reversing compiled programs.

It could also explain why these AI models are so good at it too...

How do you copyright stolen material?

The other take is AI code generation machines are directed by human inputs and will never start without that human input, so therefore it was created by a human.

Much like how a photographer 'just' clicks a button on a machine and through a very complicated process it creates media, so does the human who makes media via an AI machine.

I think because of how corporate power works and how much money is at stake this will end up as the end result. Laws are made up by humans and a majority vote in a parliament can set this to be so, previous rulings be damned. And most treaties never really ever think about how media was made because this was never an question until recently. Copyright are not constitutional rights in most counties.

> The second reason is legal: purely AI-generated code is not written by a human, meaning it should not be copyrightable.

Even if this were correct, a piece of code not being copyrighted does not automatically confer rights onto third parties to have it conveyed to them. As a matter of practice, what more than any other factor keeps proprietary code proprietary is not the legal shield of copyright but the difficulty of getting companies to convey that code to you.

I don’t know about one-shot-prompt toy apps, but when it comes to building real stuff with AI, it still takes significant effort from devs to get the results we need. There’s a difference, right? “Give me the best result” vs “Give me the result I want”. Most serious projects, at least from what I know, run on the “Give me the result I want” principle, and that’s where the dev effort goes. I know the future is heading toward “Give me the best result with no mistakes”, but that changes how much effort it takes, not who owns the output. Even if the code is generated by AI, humans own the result, because they worked with the machine to get the result they wanted. Same was true before AI: humans worked with the machine to get the result they wanted. It’s just way faster now. Using a machine to build something has never meant you don’t own what you built.

The problem with this is the assumption that models used are not a factor of the code already written by the user and ingested as context to determine the future state of the code according to the specifications.

All purely AI-generated code should be Open Source.

I've got plenty of technical designs that should not be Open Source and follow distinct design decisions AI can work with, not necessary know how to deal without context. If AI is additive it is just adding on the existing design not changing it.

Also I would dislike AI rot following into the codebase of Open Source projects making them unmaintainable.

End of the day question is if AI is driving you or are you driving the AI?

I mostly agree and have pretty much every one of my projects open source. One in particular, though, is not. And that is because the design of it is heavily domain specific and is built on loads and loads of experience. Not sure how to reconcile that...

I’m confused. Is this article meant to be a scholarly legal argument (albeit, by a novice)? Or a normative statement about what the author would prefer?

It certainly doesn’t seem to be about practical solutions. It doesn’t even touch on the ramifications of its suggestions. I’m pretty sure that it would be a massive boon to data center operators and cause most of the readers of hacker news to lose our livelihoods.

> All AI-generated code should be Open Source

What problem does this solve, though? If anything, wouldn't this help empower the frontier labs, in particular Anthropic? With everything open sourced, the labs get the knowledge of each company for free, right? Thank about how IBM owned the computation with mainframes until personal computers and workstations became powerful enough.

If we want freedom as the open source movement advocates, we'd need focus on make building open models accessible to millions of engineers and companies. Given the sheer investment required to build the frontier models, though, I'm not sure there's a way unless we have breakthroughs in the AI algorithms or hardware, so that individual engineers or small companies can build competing models.

AI has already "opened" the source of lots of software anyway, so IMHO this is a moot point. However, what AI is making more people realise is that everything is a derivative work.

Actually: All AI-generated _Output_ should be Open Source (not just code)

It's the (open) knowledge of humanity, and the thin layer above is only a minor fraction (0.1 if at all) of the 'product', which should not be allowed to be privatized by anyone - let alone destroying originals (like books) to own 'it' !

> purely AI-generated code is not written by a human, meaning it should not be copyrightable

There's a lot of room in between code that is closed-source and code that is "copyrightable".

Should code crafted via cut-and-paste from StackOverflow be open source? How about newsgroups before that? What about apps that use "no code" tooling? Is there a threshold for the use of external libraries and packages that cross the threshold for "that code was simply scraped from the internet and used without permission or proper attribution"? How about code I wrote while using auto-complete a lot?

I appreciate the author's sentiment and recognize that LLMs have aggregated the work of many, many people. I'm guessing their work wasn't wholly original either, like so much of the code I wrote before the age of LLMs. Whether those people whose work has been aggregated to train LLMs own that work - those ideas, those thoughts, those strategies - is exceedingly complex and (I speculate) largely won't hold up to real scrutiny.

Personally I am less concerned with all AI generated code being open source. We will very quickly be drowning in a sea of code, and who even wants to see it if it's easily re-created by AI? Eventually everyone will be using AI and I don't think it's feasible or makes sense for all code to be open source. Personally I _would_ like to see all models trained on public data become open-weights. To me it seems unfair to let a few companies lock up all the value of the collective works of civilization without providing something back for free.

Open sourcing all AI generated code isn't practical and doesn't really even address the issue. An AI model is never going to be able to properly provide attribution or determine what code used what license anyway. Instead, GPL code should be removed from AI training sets going forward by default. Essentially, anyone who does not want AI to train on their code / work of any sort should be able to opt out.

While this will not impact current models, future models would eventually be free of it.

I can understand the case being made on "purely AI generated code."

But thats also why its buggy.

As soon as I start refining it, and commanding the AI to fix the mistakes, this argument starts to lose ground fast.

The tech community has adopted open standards for as long as I've been alive, and the AI is using these open standards as much as it is actual code.

Perhaps an open standard to prevent code from being used as training ( it probably already exists, i dunno ).

Methods to detect it ( I've seen that showing up recently. Using AI to detect AI. )

Some sanctioned actionable penalty under provable circumstance as the resolution ?

You can see why the copyright office wants to treat this as any other thing.

The details of proving claims get complicated quickly.

He’s not wrong, but I would argue a better model is the Derivative Work. This already exists in copyright law.

If I write a space opera that is a LOT like Star Wars there are major legal implications to this. If I write an original work of science fiction involving a weapon that destroys planets as an allegory to the history of the atomic bomb, I’m probably in the clear even if one of the characters is a furry alien with a laser sword.

The challenge now is how to apply that framework when nobody can see the original or resulting code.

AI companies should be required to pay repartitions/royalties to the originators of their data. But people aren't ready to talk about this yet.

I wrote up my thoughts about this a while ago here: https://resolve.works/articles/the-tool-is-not-the-author/

Do we still care if its open or closed? Isn't reverse engineering basically solved anyway?

What's wrong with this website? When I open it in Safari on macOS, it consumes all my RAM. 20GB to start. I got a system warning to force quit some apps to maintain stability (which was a first in 5 years). When I closed other non-Safari apps, Safari usage then went up to 30GB.

Quitting and relaunching Safari, then returning to the site, produces the same results. The process for this website is what is using the RAM, it persists after closing the tab, and needs to be force quit.

i think the author presents weak arguments:

> AI models were trained on a massive corpus of Open Source

using open source shouldn't require the final product to be open source. that's pretty much most of proprietary software. most of it is built using open source code but the final product is due to a combination of thoughtful product and software knowledge and must be private since it's really the value you produce.

> purely AI-generated code is not written by a human, meaning it should not be copyrightable.

you can say AI generated code is based on human code, and that human code is open source. depending on the license (likely MIT) its technically legal to choose the generated code to be private.

> To make things fair across all jurisdictions, and to honor the open ecosystem that made AI possible, developers and companies should explicitly release AI-generated code under Open Source licenses or dedicate it to the public domain using the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license.

i somewhat agree here. AI generated code should include the original license of its authors unless it's purely AI generated using original variable names.

i previously released AI generated products/software as open source but come to think of it, in the world of abundant software, i believe there's more reason to actually privatize your code vs putting it out in the public. especially for paid software products.

Not necessarily IMO. It's not the code, but the IP is what matters. The IP holder should have full rights to make it open or not. Using a tool that leverages open knowledge doesn't prevent someone from building closed solutions.

Matthew Butterick (of https://typographyforlawyers.com/ fame) is involved in a class action suit about LLM being trained on copyrighted material. See https://llmlitigation.com/.

Maybe we should get some high-profile software devs on that as well ...

Two points I think making AI-generated code opensource Point 1: AI can (or will be able to) reverse engineer all code from how the program works. Thus, there seems to be little point in opensourcing AI generated code because it can just be reversed engineered

Point 2: Correct me if wrong but can AI generated code actually be copyrighted? If someone just keeps prompting but not touching the code would this still be considered pure AI generated work? If this is the case then point 1 and point 2 basically means AI generated code is already open source in effect if not in name.

To be honest, AI generated code must never have a license or a very permissive license

Good link in the post https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:AI-generated_medi... happy but not surprised that Wikimedia Commons has a good approach and I lovely template name as part of it: PD-algorithm

A lot of y'all here are missing something important: open source code is an application of copyright law, and it has already become clear in some countries that the output of an LLM is not coverable under copyright (i.e. it is public domain).

In the UK, the output of an LLM can come under copyright and therefore the author can license it as an open source product, but in the US it can't be done.

Alternative view on the problem. if code is really a solved problem , open source becomes a security problem? with all the attacks happening mostly on open source projects, it is not farfetched that a secure bank system will be ai generated with core libraries implementing everything from scratch, including runtime. Big business, big problems.

This idea of no libraries/external dependencies sounds extreme, until you got hacked by a tiny library for http calls and that cost you billions of losses.

By that logic, LLMs that were trained purely on proprietary code should be allowed to generate proprietary code (Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, etc. should have a quite large codebase when combining all their products).

And then again, I wonder which license should be used. Is this a case of copyleft, and therefore everything generated should be something like GPL, or is it more like public domain because no copyright can be exercised?

The article is right. If no human effort is involved then the code should be open source. The article also implies a very detailed line too. It doesn’t say that the human effort part can’t be copyrighted or intellectual property.

As an example, I have developed a set of grounding guidance for my AI models at my work. The specific grammar and vocabulary belong to my employer. But I also have a clean-room version of it that completely strips out that proprietary infringing information while still retaining a similar semantic structure. That will be posted next month on my GitHub under a GPL-3 license like I do with my other non-infringing AI-assisted work.

Definitely agree with that in concept, but there really a fact that nobody realized until recently after all the game decompilation/mix-ups: LLMs can read assembly fairly well and traditional obfuscation techniques doesn't really work on them, so if you have access to the binary and a disassembler, an LLM agent will be able to reverse engineer and reconstruct the likely high level source code of most software given enough time anyways.

In other words, almost nothing is closed source to LLMs if they have access to the binary.

> The second reason is legal: purely AI-generated code is not written by a human, meaning it should not be copyrightable.

Humans are reviewing it (mostly), and choosing to merge/deploy it. Imagine you had the million monkeys on typewriter, and a human kept reading samples until they chose one. The human is in the loop, so I don't think this argument applies.

> developers more and more rely on AI without even reviewing the generated output, let alone modifying it to fit their specific needs. Code like this, where humans put little effort, except writing prompts, should definitely be Open Source.

A person's contribution here is difficult to measure. This statement reminds me of one of my older bosses who priced software per lines written.

An AI-generated software's quality reflects the author's vision, taste, and expertise (if any). These are there regardless of the number of lines reviewed.

I would've supported open source for completely AI-generated apps including the conception of the idea.

RMS would be proud with this post though.

Since last year everything I was generating with AI I put it opensource on github! Some of these tools I use on daily basis others were experiments. It felt natural to do so, I never for a second felt or thought I owned the code output of LLMs even if I am the one who prompted it

At this point, since LLMs can reverse executables anyway, making something Open Source is hardly any leverage. Instead we could say that any products generated by AI face a tax.

Actually, why not go straight to the source and tax the AI companies for the public benefit. That is the logical reduction of the argument.

In a way all LLM code is already open source. We all have open access to the system which generates the code. All you need is the prompt, so that is the non open element.

> The second reason is legal: purely AI-generated code is not written by a human, meaning it should not be copyrightable

I think that's the actual point here. AI-generated code shouldn't necessarily be open source, but it is not (or should not be) copyrighted. You can still keep it as a trade secret, but you have no legal protections that prevent others from reusing it once they have access to it.

It seems pretty clear-cut to me. AI companies plundered the commons, but the commons have licenses that come with them that clearly state that their use and derivatives thereof must also include the license and be open source.

This is a chance for great good for humanity and for the AI companies to do the right thing for themselves and for all of us.

Not releasing the code as open source would be just... well... evil.

And a further question arises for me: If we don't start sharing the fruits of the machines now, then when?

If you type in something like: the history of code and copying previous code versus learning from it and applying that to creative intent behind AI usage for code creation --- you will find that historically that has been a progression from day one. The effort to get good code out of an AI and test/validate it does not minimize the creative intent of the user. Now intent is the operative work. Some intent is bad, some is good. Determining intent is hard for humans as it is for AI. I don't think there will be good answers except for individuals. The courts may rule one way or another. Public opinion in different groups will sway one way or the other. Saying anything is this or that is a slippery slope. The whole premise of this small article seems flawed as a concept and just ignorant of the history. Much like suing someone for a musical phrase of a few notes. There are the same chords/melodies in countless songs and it is not done maliciously. There are only 12 notes, so you figure it out. I think everyone is going crazy about AI on both sides. There are a large group in the middle that are learning how to use it and what it is and is not good for.

Open or Closed. If it is not human engineered it will just amount to the pile of generated slop. If the model generated that version it will be able to do it infinitely. I fail to see what would it fix. It's like if we ask everyone to display their socks or something trivial. If people keep something cheap private, I am puzzled with the others paying for it. We already know who trained models at first place, now what does this ask bring from consumers, I don't believe it will pay any credits to anyone.

On the other hand, I can't imagine doing what I do with AI today without it in this velocity.

The incremental complexity of stacks was a torture to engineers, up until recently. Now we can steer plenty of AI resources to where customer wants to invest. Where nowadays everyone is building ecosystems, platforms. Not a tiny integration.

I agree with the spirit of this. I'm a longtime open source developer and generally prefer GPL for my manual code. For my AI-generated code I'm using a multiple choice license of Apache, BSD, GPL, MIT.

If you're curious, here's my newest open source which helps build Rust web services along with Axum: https://github.com/publicprojects-io/axa and you can see the LICENSE.md file.

Related from the FSFE, with a bit more of legal background: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50489088

@jankiewicz: how are people expected to run a business under this model?

Not the AI's source code output should be open source but the prompt should be. The prompt is the real source and can be used in the future with newer LLM models.

I think under the code lives ideas. If somebody figure out some nice and cool thing, and coded it with llm - it's still it's idea.

Probably but zero chance, so back in the real world how do we keep people motivated to maintain open source software going forward?

Valid point but this will happen due to market forces rather than moral reasons. Anyone can write code now using AI, so charging for the code itself is getting harder every day, and only the trustworthy people will get the distribution.

The rest of the code will be open source, see how many open Wispr flow alternatives are there already, everyone has same features.

"To make things fair across all jurisdictions"

PLEASE stop right there. Nations are sovereign, they decide for themselves if/how far copyrights are enforced. Let's keep it that way. There's enough [800lb gorilla meddling in other's affairs] as it is.

I disagree, however companies who decide to work on proprietary code need to be doing comprehensive license similarity scans on their codebase or risk licensing issues

There's a decent change that AI makes closed-source software not really a thing anyway. So it'll either be open or unreleased.

I get the sentiment, but how would you prove a negative? You can get "caught" using AI, but not having been caught does not and can not prove you didn't. Given that 99.999% of projects now use AI to some extend, the logical default assumption is going to be you are probably not in the 0.001%

Why only code? What about music, movies, images? If AI generated code isn't copyrightable, why should they be?

Related question I just thought of reading this: if you are an employee at a company that you know 100% AI generates its code, and AI-generated code is not copyrightable... is that employee legally allowed to leave the company taking a full copy of the source code, and set it up as their own business?

I agree, but also, any code that a company can generate and use, an open source solution can generate and release, effectively eating the corporation’s lunch in many cases.

Open source is not always open source as we all know there are so many different flavours of it. How do you make that distinction when using AI to generate your code?

This is a debate that we need to have before it gets event more muddier.

No, copyright protects works made by humans.

AI generated code should be (is?) public domain.

Somewhat amusingly, I just posted this... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50508364

All 100% ai generated assets, art, music, text should be free and open source too.

Couldn't an org still constrain distribution (keep the repo private forever)?

What is user changes 1 line? 2 lines, 3 lines...? The concept is well intented but I doubt you can enforce it.

Fully AI output from a single prompt is not copyrightable (in the US). Is fully AI output from a sequence of prompts not copyrightable? If it is, at what point does this change?

I use AI to develop apps for manufacturing but I still have to think and point AI how things will work together. If I simply tell AI to develop something complex most of the time it will do a really bad job doing so. I do have a coding background but with AI I can focus on other things and use the time I’d spend coding to work on other problems.

> purely AI-generated code is not written by a human, meaning it should not be copyrightable

This is a very poor definition. I use Phoenix's scaffolding all the time. So, running

    mix phx.gen.html Blog Post posts title:string content:text 

Even code generated for government organizations with various levels of secrecy? Not gonna fly.

The code may be non-copyrightable, but the business logic may be proprietary and a trade secret.

Could LLMs be considered derivative work in the sense of the GNU GPL?

There is so little value to most code produced with models these days I just don’t see the point.

The real value ends up being found in software where there is a person behind it continuously refining it into something others will look at and say “Someone clearly paid attention to this.” Models can’t (yet) reproduce that because they can’t/don’t go interacting with users or asking bigger picture questions.

Whether someone is producing that software with a model or not doesn’t change much about the ownership picture to me: it’s the person that owns the project, and the LLM is a tool.

Once again, it all comes down to it being a tool and how it’s used, and there are no useful blanket statements that can be made about it (or how the tool’s output should be classified, legally or otherwise)

No, but all models should be open weight.

A pre-cursor. All AI models should be open weights/source to begin with

All models should also be open source and socially owned. All of this output is the culmination of human knowledge and should be treated as such. I get this is about copyright but I don’t think people are thinking big enough with this stuff.

As the cost of producing software approaching zero. The legal side go down with it.

Does it matter at this point when you can generate the same code easily with the same AI model?

If you put your code online just assume it's gonna get stolen and you'll never see a penny

AIs don't have copyright at all. All AI generated code is public domain

If AI services that created the code were free, I agree with the sentiment.

I could not disagree more with this view. Some of the works that reasoning models were trained on were already in the public domain. OP's statement is an attempt to get hold of code that they never build themselves. It takes human effort and human input - even if all it only determines is merely an initial random seed value - to generate the code in question. There is no fundamental baseline and there cannot be such a baseline that would provide for such a strict licensing of AI-generated code.

I kind of agree, but like most software engineering takes I think this misses the point of software as a whole.

What the software _does_ is almost always more important than how it does it (save for some amazing new technique which is very rare).

There are only so many ways to write a binary search or an octree, but the overall idea behind, say, doom is unique.

Open sourcing big blocks of code generated using standard techniques isn’t that useful (since you can just generate the same ones yourself), but the concept behind the application is the important bit (which of course, is now also easy to just generate).

If anyone can just generate their own version, who cares if it’s open source?

This article makes no sense. None of the arguments are sound and conclusive. First argument: Non sequitur. Programmers were also trained by open source software and from stack overflow and stack exchange. That's not a sound reason for their programs to be open source. Second argument: AI-generated content is not copyrightable. If that's the case, then it cannot be open source since open source licenses rely on copyright for their enforcement. The author confuses public domain with open source. Public domain and open source are two completely different types of categories with different legal implications. Third argument: This contradicts the second argument. Now programmers using AI should publish their code under an open source license or under CC0. That's a demand. Not everybody will do that and no argument is presented why they should do so. Fourth point: Not all code is a hundred percent human written and a hundred percent AI written. The author concludes from this problem that "Code like this, where humans put little effort, except writing prompts, should definitely be Open Source." There is no argument here at all. It's another personal demand without justification.

At least, the author should try to back up their demands with further justifications and make them less contradictory.

This post is so close to getting it ;)

Looks like the author wants to abolish copyright in a very round-about way. They are saying that AI-generated code should be released under CC0 due to complexities around the status of software copyright in various jurisdictions.

But if the concept of copyright was abolished as a whole, then licences such as GPL would also lose their power. Some people say that's a negative thing, but I do not necessarily think so, because it achieves the stated goal of the GPL, software freedom (i.e. you don't need to be granted a licence to copy and modify things)

> First of all, AI models were trained on a massive corpus of Open Source code written since RMS announced the GNU Project and the Free Software Movement.

I too have trained on the massive corpus of open source code. Should everything I code also be open source? Or only if I leverage an artificial neural network as a prosthesis to enhance the capabilities of my natural neural network?

There is nothing legally supporting this, as LLMs are a tool used in our creation of products. However, it would be hilarious if their code was ruled to be GPL v3.

So you are saying all open source code that uses LLM code is infringing all the proprietary licenses of code that was also hovered up, is that a hill we want to die on?

What problem does this solve exactly? I think when most code becomes generated it’s all from the same hivemind of the human collective. I see arguments that code is not the hard part of development, so why are we treating it so sanctimoniously now?

I completely agree with the OP. What irks me the most is that Amodei has trained his model on someone's else IP and now he wants to resell this to people and has the nerve to complain about distillation. Distillation should be god given right. I guess that is why they took down Jensen.

The answer is obvious. If you want to protect your code, invent a new programming language that does weird things that make it difficult for an llm to learn.

Joking of course. Not sure copywriting code ever survives the AI era.

What’s the point, if you can generate infinte code?

Essentially you're saying: AI companies are allowed to steal from all of us in order to make money, and in return they are allowed to read our private conversations and train future models in order to make even more money.

If humans are directing AI to generate code, it cannot be open source unless the human decides to make it. It is their vision that AI acted upon. So, i dont see the logic in this post or thinking. this sounds like an another altruistic progressive california thing

When AI becomes completely free to use -- that's when I'll support the idea that the result should be open source.

This is like saying programs should be open sourced because binary is machine generated.

Llms are the compiler, and there are skill levels with vibe coding.

It's hard to respond to something so reductive. This is the "everything's already been invented" angle.

Show us the math proof you have under your pillow. If there is not any, you do not have right to anything.

The Supreme Court wiping out trillions of dollars of equity value with a stroke of the pen by declaring all AI generated code open source would be hilarious.

And good for humanity.

RMS fans advocating for copyright enforcement... what?

Well good news, I guess. AI generated code is public domain. It cannot be copyrighted.

Until a couple of years ago, learning was not considered theft.

if i pay for AI to generate code, shouldn't i decide what to do with it?

by that logic, anyone who learned to code from open source projects should make their own code open source too.

Good idea. We just have to pay for the human-written part. Same with medical research and new medicines, new energy technologies, robotics, movies and music, and future AI. Eventually, as AI does more and more, everything will be free and open source.

You've figured out a way to eliminate money.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how LLMs have essentially made all code open source in a strange and very capitalist way: They’ve appropriated our human work—without regard for any licenses—by force and without any compensation to the authors, and are now selling the code back to anyone who’s willing to pay for it.

But yeah, aside from that, I’m also releasing all my Vibe Coding games under the MIT license: https://github.com/retrogames23/

All code should be Open Source.

Following this logic, there should be no fees at all on coding models, since they scraped the web on this knowledge. Same applies for books, pictures, music btw. This debate has not even started yet.

This may be the path to the true public domain.

I see you and raise.. AI should be free

I think copyright law has simply failed to keep up with the reality of technological progress.

I don’t really see a problem with LLMs slurping up and regurgitating the world’s knowledge, if it was all freely and equitably available, and more importantly had been beforehand. We’d all herald it as an incredible innovation. And in some ways it is even now, because I do have access to it in numerous forms.

The problem is that some author’s livelihood is adversely impacted by this, as copyright is (in a sense) what ensured their remuneration for the original work. So LLMs undermine the existing social and financial order in deleterious ways. It’s the same thing we’ve seen play out in mathematics, a bunch if tech bros show up with a powerful tool, use it in a brash manner that likely causes real harm, then worse, start pulling up the ladder when big media conglomerates complain.

I suspect we’ll soon be in a situation where we no longer have easy access to unfiltered LLM outputs. If your OSS project was in the training corpus it will still retrieve it. It will not, however, retrieve content from NYT or other protected sources. The end result is that small-scale, solo creators are damaged, and large-scale creators are still afforded copyright protection.

There is no way to enforce opennness. The LLM gives me output, I iterate on it by hand and with other language models, who does it belong to now? We are ushering in a post scarcity world for a select few.

Nice pitchfork but I've got a hot take of my own:

No one goes to an LLM and says, 'Make code'. More often than not (and with exceptions) there's a very specific problem getting solved. The distinction between human 'effort' (whatever that means) and Ai effort (??) is more or less arbitrary... Infact, it's almost xenophobic and snooty. Pre-Ai humans had other humans build something like x but with y specific features. If it wasn't a problem then, it's not a problem now just because people don't have to directly deal with another human. In the same vein, I think people are forgetting that sometimes projects are birthed by slapping together code (or an instruction for code) from all across the Internet.

So really... What even is 'purely Ai generated' code? Nothing comes from nothingness and generally I'd prefer the purest expression of my ideas be protected regardless of who wrote it... Human4hire or Chat.

EDIT: This article is unnecessarily upsetting. I don't even understand the problem when at the end of the day. A shit ton of the value accrues to all of us... humans! Not even the companies (atleast not so far). If Artificial Intelligence really is a utility, like electricity, then wtf is exactly the problem? I hope nobody really gives any real thoughts to policing Ai usage... It'd be as unreasonable as policing a calculator or pen and paper.

Manners force me to stop here.

There is no such thing as AI generated code, just as there is no such thing as keyboard generated code. The only difference is that your keyboard manufacturer never had the gall to sign git commits -qwerty.

AGPLv3, not "Open Source." AGPLv3 is the most restrictive FOSS license, and it's one that other GPLs can be licensed into, but not out of.

Open Source licenses can be relicensed into anything, so they don't really count in the conversation - except that you'll need to include a copy of all the licenses touched that require that, and often include copyrights. You might be able to legally do that by just putting them on your LLM's website, though, who knows?

It would be very funny if distribution of LLM written software required that you include a milti-GB zip file of every possible Open Source license or copyright that may have been touched, and you were required to license it as AGPLv3. I honestly think that not doing so is a convenient reinterpretation of current law rather than an honest one; it's an absurd outcome, but not that absurd.

It is disappointing to see many people who espoused that copyright is bullshit now saying copyright should make people do what they personally want. I suppose it was never about freedom for them, only getting what they want when they want it.

Whether programs written by LLMs should be protected by copyright law is also an entirely different question than should the authors be legally required to release the source code under a specific kind of license.

Every company on Earth that produces software is using AI to generate code. So this will never happen.

This article misunderstands copyright law -- citing an example that argues against it.

It cited Naruto v Slater, which unsuccessfully argued that the copyright for a monkey's selfie belong to the monkey, not to the owner of photography equipment.

The courts dismissed the case as animals cannot hold copyright.

---

While the courts did not rule it, the apparent copyright holder is the photographer Slater who received royalties.

This is directly analogous to AI code, in which a human did not directly author the characters but regardless had "significant creative contributions."

Both claims are easily rebutted .

> AI is trained on open source

It sure is, but the composition is a unique creation. Every creative artifact includes some derivation. A rhythm, instrument, media etc.

> AI isn’t made by humans.

Well neither is a canvas, paint, a chair. Everything we use is made by an automated tool, many products are nearly 100% automation.

Yes and, furthermore, all property is theft.

It already is. Just ask AI to give it to you.

Not if you see the AI-generated code as same as 90's java bytecode compiled by a tool (machine). In both cases, the input (AI prompts or 90's java code) is human-written. Just because a machine is involved in converting human input to some next low-level artifact, the low-level artifact does not become open source, when the human input is not.

WOKE, no other word fits. You should move to another planet. Everything is stolen online, from marketing copy to books. And code is the one fight you want to have, the thing actually that is productive.

My patterns for loading data into Python is pretty much the same everytime with polars. I didn’t create that - I looked it up from a book somewhere. Do I need to open source it?

The AI machine just went out and read a bunch of examples then adapted them, which is what lots of programmers do.

At the end of the day you don't actually need to see the source code if you can just regenerate it yourself. If you use a later ai model, your code will probably be better anyway.

If AI generated code is not copyrightable, releasing it under an open source license is meaningless.

Is this for real? If you get your way gosh knows the amount of "proprietary" software that would be open-source. Also really by this logic, even 5 years ago if I copied a method and made it my own from stack overflow or got an answer from there my code should have been open source. Kinda silly no?

Maybe by the same logic all code should be open source before AI if the author used stackoverflow, read a book, remembered their college education or read a blog?

The messy part in this idea is the “especially when human effort is minimal” bit.

No offense to anybody but I do believe there is no Intellectual Property (IP) anymore in the age of AI if one wants to defend or attack it was breached.

All LLM code should belong to the entity that hosts the model.

Code has lost almost all of it's value, who cares if it is open source. In a couple of years, you will say "make me a web browser" and 4 hours later performant, fully standards compliant web browser will be running.

The argument between open and closed source has little value anymore and will soon not even make sense to discuss. It will be like writing "2 + 2" and arguing over whether my "closed source" copy of "2 + 2" vs your "open source" copy of "2 + 2". When something is trivial to reproduce it becomes absurd to argue over who owns it.

Open source people have had half a century to figure out how to make money with fairly little success (aside from a dozen or so very notable projects, and looking at all my AI slop, I don't see one of these hiding in there).

I don't particularly care about copyright or whatever ethical arguments yo may come up with -- I write code mostly for money, as do my competitors -- if you can figure out a way to stop them from using AI, I'm fine with not using it either. I'm fairly skeptical you can close Pandora's box though.

That aside, we may see more software going in a source-available direction -- either that or full cloud. Up until now being closed source was a competitive advantage, but now it's trivial to clone even fairly huge software suites, so that's less of a factor.

Having the source may also become a bigger advantage for regular users than before -- given they can now vibecode extensions/plugins, or customize the software more than what a config would personally allow. this probably wings the calculus away from a Photoshop-style license, and closer an Unreal Engine-style license.

Either that; or everything goes full cloud of course.

And everything that can be handled as a common should.

That is everything bar one own mind and body, I guess, but your lineage might vary, and for sure some people out there would rather be deemed owner of everything under the sun, starting with human corps and souls.

Yes.

Until and unless every creator and contributor of every piece of training data consumed by these models is fairly compensated for the use of their works, then absolutely everything created by these models should be 100% open source - including the models themselves.

All code should be open source.

I agree

Hot take indeed, and something I disagree with. If I am paying for AI, my code is my code, no?

Honestly, I'm cool with that if all AI models are also made open-weight.

If AI-generated code should be open-source, then if an AI generates the code for Pokemon red, does that mean that it becomes open-source? I agree with the high level idea, but the way it is stated is too problematic.

Here here!

Well it is certainly not covered by copyright and to the extent it could be covered by trade secret is perhaps a debate.

This will never happen because it would essentially destroy every corporation now, the economy, and therefore every politician's funding source.

The output of machine intelligence has to be available to everyone or we're just breeding a new demigod class. We should make it a public utility, like water or electricity.

I can get behind that.

I think the legal standard currently in the United States is that all AI output is public domain.

This means that all AI generated code is public domain at the point of it being generated.

Of course just because something is public domain that doesnt mean you have to release the code publicly. Public domain just affects what others can do with the output. It doesnt mean you have to release the code yourself.

The new Epic Games Store is apparently entirely vibe coded. So that technically would mean that the source code for it would be public domain right? But people still can't copy the store or do whatever they want as you have trademarks protecting it. And Epic is under no obligation to release the code..

I am not a lawyer. It's possible I am completely misunderstanding the situation. Is there something I am getting wrong?

>First of all, AI models were trained on a massive corpus of Open Source code written since RMS announced the GNU Project and the Free Software Movement. That code was simply scraped from the internet and used without permission or proper attribution. The models were also trained on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange sister projects, which are released under Creative Commons licenses that legally require attribution. Turning this collective knowledge into proprietary, closed-source code feels like license laundering.

Strong argument, but the case that such a strong transformation should maintain the original licence only applies to my knowledge to GPL, which consists of a very small portion of the training set. Creative Commons would not even require the source code to be distributed, just attribution, which may already be the case by the nature of the models.

>"The second reason is legal: purely AI-generated code is not written by a human, meaning it should not be copyrightable. The foundation for this principle in the US goes back to the famous Monkey Selfie dispute, which established that non-humans cannot hold copyrights."

But no one claims that the AI holds the copyright, unlike Greenpeace which claimed that Naruto the monkey held the copyright.

Why do people think that people receive the gift of open source software are somehow obligated as a result of receiving that gift?

Yes, it was trained on free software. Why does that mean my privacy should be invaded now if I distribute binaries I made?

There is still substantial human effort and R&D that goes into developing a complex code base with AI agents.

Downvoting sentiments that don't agree with the author's position is gross.

I think this misses the point a bit. All code should be open source. Full stop.

other copyrightable things aren't copyrightable if they're ai generated. why is code different? for clarity, i'm not at all being rhetorical, i don't know the answer to this question and i'd love some education if you're handing it out.

And AIs should be under libraries as AIs are the repository of all human knowledge scraped up without permission. Libraries are societies repositories/solution for this sort of access/use of shared knowledge like that used to create AI.

agreed. The problem is _which_ open source, because what we're probably going to slowly realize is most software will now be a public good and proper governance is needed thats indistinguishable from a public utility.

But we're not headed in that direction are we.

I strongly agree. Look at what we’ve done here:

1. Software had a strong movement of freely sharing all code because they believed this technology was too important to be controlled by corporations.

2. AI companies managed to create millions of RL environments from GitHub PR’s and similar, and train their model to learn what it means to code from all the human labour in the world from the past 30 or so years.

3. Companies now use these closed source AI models, to automate and fire their human workers who enabled this.

Something has gone seriously wrong here, whether this falls under copyright or not is besides the point.

We weaponized a fundamentally good instinct that generated a lot of value for society and allowed corporations to rent seek on all the data these humans generated to help other humans not trillion dollar corporations.

“Well we’ll give them a UBI check”, the AI company says which is a complete non-sequitur. It’s not about the money, most of us have saved enough.

The only solution that sounds good to me, is a model trained on Open Source Data must be Open Source and all the code it generates must also be open source. This is the only way to stop the coming rent seeking. Even mathematicians will be happy with this change!

Even if you modify it before using it, it's still based on open source (often GPL) code, so just everything based in part on LLM output should be open source.

The author needs to realize that this is unenforceable.

In fact I'd argue that free software and open source is economically dead and unsustainable because of AI generated code and almost no one wants to pay for their tools because an AI can generate the missing feature for them close to $0.

Maintaining it is another thing, but assuming that the cost of tokens get cheaper, why wait for open source developers to maintain it when a frontier AI model can do it for far cheaper and quicker?

I am just saying what the average manager turned vibe coder would say who will refuse to donate or pay for established open source projects that they use for free.

it’s not a hot take, it’s something most people wont bother to read cause it’ll never happen.

the only merit or such claim is to maybe move the overton window a tiny bit. maybe that’s worth the blog post

We already have a growing discoverability problem in many areas of content and throwing more slop into the mix is not the solution. This place for example has become a dumping ground for people, usually with no other activity here, to advertise their shovelware AI projects.

Here is a different angle. A programming language is a material like wood, aluminum, or stone. If you know the syntax and properties of it can you start trying to bend it to your will - you can make a ship, a satelite, or a children’s toy wihh tv the same language. You first have to spend years mastering the material and its limitations before you can bend it, so only a small number of the people who want to make stuff get to. Some people release open versions of a ship and a satelite you can start from, to lower the threshold of making stuff. They protect them to make sure giant shipbuilder doesn’t go making an army of their ships to kill their trade.

AI comes along and now grandma, who was formerly a midwife and teenager from home can start bending aluminum and carving wood with their words through AI. There are a bunch of open ships and satellites in the market, but Grandma is using her midwifing skills to ask AI to bend a new tool for her that helps turn breach babies around without requiring a c-section. No open source breach tools or medical tools on the market Grandma just needs aluminum and wood combination she would never be able to achieve without AI. She hammers down a lot - sending 1000 follow-up prompts to make the AI do stuff nobody has done before. Next her grandson decided to combine tungsten and wood to make a new toy that helps kids go airborne and land safely every time - like an egg-drop but for real life people. No open source code for that out there - he used the AI which knew the properties and the languages needed to get his idea to work. He hammers the AI with follow up questions and edits a bunch of the code where the AI defaults to the wrong setup, by trained convention. But he succeede. By this plan should they be allowed to copyright their work? Should their work be automatically open source so they can never monetize it either?

I will be the first to make all my work free and open-source once I can obtain air, clean water, basic food, shelter for myself and my family, electricity, heating, medicine, education and internet access for free.

Until then, I’m sorry, but I have to feed my family while we all navigate this goddamn global transformation process.

Can someone help me understand who is still writing code by hand? Even though it’s been only 7 months since I stopped, it seems like such an outlandish concept to me. Can’t imagine opening up neovim and typing “const sm = …” nowadays.

I keep seeing posts like this (especially on reddit) that infer some people are still writing code by hand and its confusing.

Articles like this promotes extreme views while we should be moderate on what should be OpenSource or not.

First of all, nobody must force OpenSource. Period. Second, such exterme views spawn extreme views in the opposite side.

Discussion is good, but this article is too draconian to be practical.

This means “all software should be Open Source unless written fully by humans”, which practically means almost all software in the near future, which is a terrible idea for multiple reasons.

No, but all models trained on public data should be open weights by law.

This is like saying: All humans who learned from open source code should only produce open source code.