This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged. But you don't, in my experience. And that generates a new work fully copyrightable even if the original wasn't. Just like how the fad a decade or so ago of taking Tolstoy and Jane Austen works and adding new elements -- "Android Karenina" and "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" are copyrighted works even if the majority of the text in them was from public domain sources.
Skimming over the article, it's a lot about what the copyright office said and very little about what courts said. But the opinion of the copyright office doesn't have any legal force. Regulations passed by the copyright office would be binding, but their opinions are just opinions. We will have to wait until relevant court cases reach a conclusion. And so far running litigation isn't even about that question, it's about infringing the rights of works that are in the training data
Here's a question I have: if the AI generated image is of a character of which you own the IP, don't you have protections based on the character regardless of who gets copyright protections from authorship of the image?
Yeah if you have a copyright on the character, the AI generated image doesn’t change that. It doesn’t give you more of less protection than you already had.
You use humans to edit AI code? When you level up you are just using AI to write, AI to review, AI to edit, AI to test. Not a lot of steps left for meat bags.
AI for review is terrible, and by no fault of their own. It's our job to specify and document intention, domain and the right problems to solve, and that is just hard to do. No getting around it. That's job security for us meat bags.
I'm sure it's not quite that simple. Only parts the parts of those knock-off works that aren't public domain could be copyrightable. If you only own the copyright to ten lines in a 10k line codebase, then it's probably fair use for someone else to just to take the whole thing.
> That's arbitrary and quite unproductive convo to be honest.
Yeah but that’s what the legal system ostensibly does. Splitting fine hairs over whether a derived work is “transformative” is something lawyers and judges have been arguing and deciding for centuries. Just because it’s hard to define a bright red line, doesn’t mean the decision is arbitrary. Courts will mull over whether a dotted quarter note on the fourth bar of a melody constitutes an independent work all day long. It seems absurd, but deciding blurry lines are what courts are built to handle.
Wrong. This territory was heavily covered in music before this code concept - it has to be “transformative” in the eyes of the law. Even going in and cleaning up code or adding 10-25% new code won’t pass this threshold. Don't bother arguing with me on this, just accept reality and deal with it.
I want this question to have an interesting answer, but everyone knows that if this question ever goes to the courts, ownership will go to the people in charge with the money. The idea that Anthropic may not own Claude Code just because Claude wrote it is wishful thinking.
The work-for-hire doctrine actually supports your intuition more than the AI authorship question does. The reason Anthropic likely owns Claude Code has little to do with whether Claude wrote it and everything to do with the employment contracts of the engineers who directed it. The DMCA takedown question is genuinely interesting though because DMCA requires the claimant to assert copyright ownership in good faith. If a court later found the codebase was predominantly AI-authored and therefore not copyrightable, the 8,000 takedowns could be challenged as bad faith DMCA claims. That is a different and more tractable legal question than the ownership one.
Best part is, it's likely to have a different answer in every country, who knows what'll happen, not every country implicitly sides with the ones with the most money.
It's not wishful thinking, and ownership isn't a foregone conclusion.
Sure the courts could mint a communist society with a few weird decisions about property rights, but this being the US do you really suppose that's likely?
There's really no legal question of any kind that models aren't people and therefore cannot own property (and also cannot enter into legal contract as would be required to reassign the intellectual property they don't and can't own)
The catch-22 is that the fact that models aren't people is only relevant if you treat them similar to a person. Like the US Copyright Office's opinion which treats it similar to a freelancer. If you treat the LLM as a machine similar to a camera, with the author expressing their existing intent through the tools of this machine, ownership is back on the table and more or less how it was before LLMs.
Well if the camera in addition to choosing autoexposure also decided how to frame the shots, which lens to use, where to stand, and everything else salient to the artistry of photography -- all without direct human intervention, then I would think the situation would again be analogous. If the camera could do all that because an intern was holding it, the intern would still own the shots even if their employer gave them the assignment.
That's why the intern signs an employment contract that reassigns their rights to their employer!!
The elephant in the room, of course, is what constitutes “meaningful human authorship.” However, I cannot shake off the feeling that all user interactions with these AI models are being logged. Perhaps this may turn out to be the bigger concern in a potential legal battle than code authorship.
That's quite impressive approach from the companies' perspective. Let's first use claude code and then we'll think who the code belongs to.
I think that the gold rush approach happening right now around me (my company EMs forcing me to work with claude as fast as possible) show really short-sight of all the management people.
First - I lose my understanding of the code base by relying too much on claude code.
Second - we drop all the good coding practices (like XP, code review etc.) because claude is reviewing claude's code.
Third - we just take a big smelly dump on the teamwork - it's easier and cheaper to let one developer drive the whole change from backend to frontend, despite there are (or were) two different teams - one for FE, one for BE.
Fourth - code commenting was passe, as the code is documentation itself... Unless... there is a problem with the context (which is). So when the people were writing the code, they would not understand the over-engineered code because of their fault. But now we make a step back for our beloved claude because it has small context... It's unfair treatment.
I could go on and on. And all those cultural changes are because of money. So I dub this "goldrush", open my popcorn and see what happens next.
The fourth point about code commenting is the one that connects directly to the ownership question. When developers write comments to explain intent, those comments are evidence of human creative direction. When Claude writes the code and the comments, and the developer merges without adding their own explanation of the architectural decisions, the record of human authorship disappears along with the institutional knowledge. The documentation problem and the copyright problem are the same problem.
> Third - we just take a big smelly dump on the teamwork - it's easier and cheaper to let one developer drive the whole change from backend to frontend, despite there are (or were) two different teams - one for FE, one for BE.
Agree with your other points, but IMO this one has always been better. You often need to design the backend and frontend to work with each other, and that requires a lot more coordination when it's separate teams.
Also, it's supremely easy do the wrong abstractions long term and compromise premature internal designs that will start to starve of human mental modeling, hence explaining with accountability how things work and what the plans are when an incident happens.
Also, if the wrong generalizations are introduced, coded correctly and reviewed and approved by AIs, then who's even driving really?
I rarely see #3 yield better solutions, it's usually better to collaborate as a team on requirements and gotchas, but let one person own implementation.
I think it should be pretty clear that if you provided the tool the specification for the code you want, you have already provided creative input.
After all, is this not what happens with compilers as well? LLM agents are just quite advanced compilers that don't require the specification to be as detailed as with traditional compilers.
The compiler analogy is the right one to reach for and the Copyright Office addressed it directly: the question is not whether you provided input, it is whether the creative expression in the output reflects human authorship. With a traditional compiler, the programmer authors every expression in the source. With an LLM, the programmer authors the intent and the model makes the expressive decisions about structure, naming, pattern, and implementation. Whether that distinction matters legally is what Allen v. Perlmutter is working through right now. The summary judgment briefing completed in early 2026 and it may be the next landmark ruling on exactly this question.
>it should be pretty clear that if you provided the tool the specification for the code you want, you have already provided creative input.
If you provided a human contractor with the specifications for the code you want, the courts have repeatedly made clear you have not provided the creative input from a copyright perspective, and the contractor needs to explicitly assign those rights to you if want to own the copyright on the code.
I’m no lawyer but I feel that meta, my employer, wouldn’t be letting us go hog-wild with Claude code if they weren’t completely confident that they fully owned the outputs, whether we change it or not.
Meta's confidence almost certainly rests on the employment contracts and IP assignment clauses, not on a legal theory that AI output is inherently copyrightable. The enterprise agreement with Anthropic assigns outputs to the licensee. The employment contract assigns work product to Meta. Those two documents together give Meta a defensible ownership position regardless of the authorship question. The interesting gap is for developers using personal accounts or consumer plans on side projects, where neither of those documents exists.
This is all well and good as an intellectual exercise, but in real life none of this matters. Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable or seriously thinks their code is a moat. I've written the same chunks of code for a number of employers as has every engineer. We've all taken chunks from stack overflow and other places without carefully considering attribution.
This comes up in a few places as a kind of vindictive battle. One example is Oracle suing Google for too closely mimicking their API in Android. Here is an example:
> private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
if (fromIndex > toIndex)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" +
fromIndex +
") > toIndex(" +
toIndex + ")");
if (fromIndex < 0)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);
if (toIndex > arrayLen)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
}
And it was deemed fair use by the Supreme Court. Other times high frequency hedge funds sued exiting employees, sometimes successfully. In America, anyone can sue you for any reason, so sure, you'll have Ellison take a feud up with Page and Brin all the way up to the Supreme Court.
In 99.9% of instances none of this matter. Sure there's the technical letter of the law but in practice, and especially now, none of this matters.
> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable or seriously thinks their code is a moat.
You'd be surprised! Among non-software management types, they often think of the code as extremely valuable IP and a trade secret. I'm a CTO and I've made comments before to non/less technical peers about how the code (generally speaking) isn't that big of a secret, and I routinely get shocked expressions. In one case the company almost passed on a big contract because it required disclosure of the source code (with an NDA). When I told them that was a silly reason and explained why, they got it, but the old way of thinking still permeates and is a hard habit to break.
Edit: Fixed errant copy pasta error. Glad that wasn't a password :-)
Maybe LLM coding agents change the equation by making it much easier to adapt and use foreign and probably incomplete code. Getting you closer to competing with the original authors in a shorter amount of time than generating new code from scratch.
You're right, I guess maybe I mean in any serious actionable way. Senior, non technical people leave plenty of money on the table by thinking they're protecting something valuable or they have some kind of secret sauce. It's all silly is what I meant to say, and digging into the technicalities of whether your code is truly copyrightable is kind of pointless. It's all vibes.
The place where it concretely matters is M&A due diligence. Acquirers are now routinely asking about AI tool usage in development and running license scans as a condition of closing. A codebase that cannot demonstrate human authorship over its core IP, or that contains GPL contamination, creates a representation and warranty problem in the purchase agreement. For most companies day to day you are right. For the companies that get acquired or raise institutional capital, the question becomes very concrete very quickly.
If there is no artwork, there can be no copyright. If every character of the code to write is basically predetermined by the APIs you need to call, there is no artwork and no copyright.
Build a novel new API, and you'll be protected though.
> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable
I think this is an unusual opinion.
Code may not be copyrightable in as small chunks as you put there, but in terms of larger pieces I think companies and individuals very often labour under the belief that code is intellectual property under copyright law.
If code isn't copyrightable, from where comes the GPL?
And why does anyone care if (for instance) some Microsoft code might have accidentally ended up in ReactOS, causing that project to need to go into a locked-down review mode for months or years? For that matter why do employers assert that they own the copyright in contracts?
I think it's the opposite - almost everyone thinks their code is copyrightable, outside of APIs and interop stuff, or things so simple as to be trivial.
Seems to gloss over other kinds of contamination, beyond GPL code. Code from pirated text books, the problem with the entire language model being trained on copyright data, and on the possibility of the training data containing various copyrighted code.
Anthropic "solved" this by intermingling the texts extracted from pirated books (illegal) with texts extracted from the physical books they bought and destroyed (legal), so no one can clearly say if the copyrighted material it spits out came from a legal source or not. Everyone rejoiced.
The intermingling argument is actually central to the Bartz settlement structure. The settlement required destruction of the pirated dataset specifically because commingled training data creates an unresolvable provenance problem. For deployers building on Claude, EDPB Opinion 28/2024 requires a documented assessment of the foundation model's training data legal basis before deployment. "We cannot tell which outputs came from which source" is not a satisfactory answer to a regulator running that assessment. wrote about it before here: https://legallayer.substack.com/p/i-read-every-edpb-document...
Nobody disputes that I own the copyright in a sound recording I made just by pushing the red button on my recorder. So it is a mystery to me that copyright to any sort of human conditioned machine generation is in dispute.
The sound recording analogy breaks down at the point where the recorder makes no creative decisions. Pressing record captures what is already there. Prompting Claude generates something that did not exist, through decisions the model makes about structure, naming, pattern, and implementation. The closer analogy is hiring a session musician and telling them the key and tempo. You own the recording under work-for-hire if they signed the right contract, but the creative expression in the performance is theirs unless explicitly assigned. The button you push to start the model is not the same button as the one on the recorder.
One question I have is this: if an employee produces code predominantly generated by AI, it means that it is not copyrightable. Does that mean that the employee can take that code and publish it on the Internet?
Or is it still IP even if it is not copyrightable? That would feel weird: if it's in the public domain, then it's not IP, is it?
That is exactly the right question and the answer is genuinely strange. Uncopyrightable work falls into the public domain, which means anyone can use it, copy it, or build on it freely. The employer can still call it a trade secret and protect it through confidentiality obligations in employment contracts, but that protection is contractual rather than property-based. A trade secret loses protection the moment it is disclosed. So the employer's claim over purely AI-generated code is essentially: "you cannot share this" rather than "we own this." Those are meaningfully different legal positions, and most companies have not thought through which one they actually have.
So employees are not allowed to distribute the code, but if it leaks, then it is public and the company cannot do anything about it. Correct? That's what happened to Anthropic I think?
A recipe isn't copyrightable but is still protected under trade secret law. I imagine that the same would apply. I think the major difference with software copyright is that I can just decompile your binary or copy a binary and give it to other people. For SAAS companies that don't distribute binaries, I imagine they basically have the same protections against rogue employees.
To look at it another way, just because some code I work on at my job is derived from open source MIT-licensed code doesn't mean I personally have the right to distribute it if my company doesn't want me to. I'd guess this comes under some generic "confidential information" clause in the employment contract.
Hmm your example is different: if you manually write code, there is a copyright for it whether it is derived from an MIT-licence or not. If you don't own that copyright (because your employer does), then you don't have the right to distribute it because it is not your code.
If you generate the same code with AI, now it does not have a copyright. If it depends on an MIT library, then the MIT library has a copyright and you have to honour the licence. But the code you produced does not have a copyright (because it was generated by an AI). And therefore nobody "owns" it. My question is: can your employer prevent you from distributing something they don't own?
Maybe the useful test is not “who wrote this line?” but “can you show how it went from requirement/prompt/context to diff to human review/tests?” If you can’t, ownership is only one issue. You also can’t tell what was accepted as engineering work versus just copied output.
This is actually closer to how the Copyright Office thinks about it than the article makes clear. The registration guidance that emerged from the Thaler proceedings specifically asks applicants to describe the human creative contributions and how the AI was used. A documented workflow showing requirement, architectural decision, rejection of AI output, human restructuring, and review creates a paper trail that maps directly onto what the Office looks for. The can you show how it got here test you are describing is the practical version of the legal standard.
Twice in my career the owners of a company have wanted to sue competitors for stealing their "product" after poaching our staff.
Each time, the lawyers came in and basically told us that suing them for copyright is suicide, will inevitably be nearly impossible to prove, and money would be better spent in many other areas.
In fact, we ended up suing them (and they settled) for stealing our copyrighted clinical content, which they copied so blatantly they left our own typos and customer support phone number in it.
Go ahead, try to sue over your copyrighted code, 10 years and 100M later you will end up like Google v Oracle. What if the code is even 5% different? What about elements dictated by external constraints; hardware, industry standards, common programming practices, these aren't copyrightable.
Then you have merger doctrine, how many ways can we really represent the same basic functions?
Same goes with the copyleft argument, "code resembling copyleft" is incredibly vague, it would need to be verbatim the code, not resembling. Then you have the history of copyleft, there have been many abuses of copyleft and only ~10 notable lawsuits. Now because AI wrote it (which makes it _even harder_ to enforce), we will see a sudden outburst of copyleft cases? I doubt it.
Ultimately anyone can sue you for any reason, nothing is stopping anyone right now from suing you claiming AI stole their copyleft code.
The model ownership question and the output ownership question run on separate legal tracks and the piece focuses on the second deliberately. On the first: the model weights are owned by Anthropic under work-for-hire from their engineers regardless of what the training data contained. Training data copyright infringement is a separate tort claim against Anthropic, not a basis for anyone else to claim ownership of the model. The Bartz settlement resolved the pirated books claim without disturbing Anthropic's ownership of the weights. Owning the training data does not give you ownership of the model trained on it, any more than owning the paint gives you ownership of the painting.
This is the sharpest point in the thread. You are right if the output has no copyright to begin with, there is nothing to assign. The employer's contractual claim over purely AI-generated code is not a copyright claim, it is a trade secret and confidentiality claim. Those are weaker protections: they require the information to remain secret, they do not survive disclosure, and they cannot be enforced against independent creation of the same code. Most IP assignment clauses in employment contracts were not drafted with this scenario in mind and may be claiming rights that do not legally exist.
It’s the same as photography. No photographer built the multibillion dollar supply chain for the optics train in a camera, nor did they build the city scape they are enjoying as a background, they simply set the stage and push a button.
This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged. But you don't, in my experience. And that generates a new work fully copyrightable even if the original wasn't. Just like how the fad a decade or so ago of taking Tolstoy and Jane Austen works and adding new elements -- "Android Karenina" and "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" are copyrighted works even if the majority of the text in them was from public domain sources.
The article addresses this explicitly:
> Works predominantly generated by AI without meaningful human authorship are not eligible for copyright protection
Note the word "predominantly", and the discussion that follows in the article about what the courts and the copyright office said.
Skimming over the article, it's a lot about what the copyright office said and very little about what courts said. But the opinion of the copyright office doesn't have any legal force. Regulations passed by the copyright office would be binding, but their opinions are just opinions. We will have to wait until relevant court cases reach a conclusion. And so far running litigation isn't even about that question, it's about infringing the rights of works that are in the training data
No such assumption is made in the article.
Nor does it give a single answer.
Mere prompting is still not enough for copyright, and the problem is unsolved on how much contribution a human needs to make to the generated code.
In the case for generated images copyright has been assigned only to the human-modified parts.
Even worse, it will be slightly different in other nations.
The only one that accepts copyright for the unchanged output of a prompt is China.
Here's a question I have: if the AI generated image is of a character of which you own the IP, don't you have protections based on the character regardless of who gets copyright protections from authorship of the image?
Yeah if you have a copyright on the character, the AI generated image doesn’t change that. It doesn’t give you more of less protection than you already had.
You use humans to edit AI code? When you level up you are just using AI to write, AI to review, AI to edit, AI to test. Not a lot of steps left for meat bags.
You're forgetting that you need coffee/tea/mate to fuel the button pushers. The Jetsons predicted this decades ago.
AI for review is terrible, and by no fault of their own. It's our job to specify and document intention, domain and the right problems to solve, and that is just hard to do. No getting around it. That's job security for us meat bags.
AI to write - code is buggy and not what I asked for
AI to review - shallow minutia and bikeshedding
AI to edit - wrote duplicated functions that already existed
AI to test - special casing and disabling code to pass the narrow tests it wrote
AI report - "Everything looks good, ship it!"
I'm sure it's not quite that simple. Only parts the parts of those knock-off works that aren't public domain could be copyrightable. If you only own the copyright to ten lines in a 10k line codebase, then it's probably fair use for someone else to just to take the whole thing.
Plus what if Anna Karenina was GPL?
> This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged.
How much code do you need to change in order for it to be original? One line? 10%? More than 50%?
That's arbitrary and quite unproductive convo to be honest.
> That's arbitrary and quite unproductive convo to be honest.
Yeah but that’s what the legal system ostensibly does. Splitting fine hairs over whether a derived work is “transformative” is something lawyers and judges have been arguing and deciding for centuries. Just because it’s hard to define a bright red line, doesn’t mean the decision is arbitrary. Courts will mull over whether a dotted quarter note on the fourth bar of a melody constitutes an independent work all day long. It seems absurd, but deciding blurry lines are what courts are built to handle.
Because at the end of the day, someone has to own the code, so some lines have to be drawn no matter how arbitrary they seem.
Ok what about all the Anthropic’s engineers who say they don’t write code at all and it’s 100% AI-generated?
Wrong. This territory was heavily covered in music before this code concept - it has to be “transformative” in the eyes of the law. Even going in and cleaning up code or adding 10-25% new code won’t pass this threshold. Don't bother arguing with me on this, just accept reality and deal with it.
I want this question to have an interesting answer, but everyone knows that if this question ever goes to the courts, ownership will go to the people in charge with the money. The idea that Anthropic may not own Claude Code just because Claude wrote it is wishful thinking.
The work-for-hire doctrine actually supports your intuition more than the AI authorship question does. The reason Anthropic likely owns Claude Code has little to do with whether Claude wrote it and everything to do with the employment contracts of the engineers who directed it. The DMCA takedown question is genuinely interesting though because DMCA requires the claimant to assert copyright ownership in good faith. If a court later found the codebase was predominantly AI-authored and therefore not copyrightable, the 8,000 takedowns could be challenged as bad faith DMCA claims. That is a different and more tractable legal question than the ownership one.
Best part is, it's likely to have a different answer in every country, who knows what'll happen, not every country implicitly sides with the ones with the most money.
It's not wishful thinking, and ownership isn't a foregone conclusion.
Sure the courts could mint a communist society with a few weird decisions about property rights, but this being the US do you really suppose that's likely?
There's really no legal question of any kind that models aren't people and therefore cannot own property (and also cannot enter into legal contract as would be required to reassign the intellectual property they don't and can't own)
The catch-22 is that the fact that models aren't people is only relevant if you treat them similar to a person. Like the US Copyright Office's opinion which treats it similar to a freelancer. If you treat the LLM as a machine similar to a camera, with the author expressing their existing intent through the tools of this machine, ownership is back on the table and more or less how it was before LLMs.
Well if the camera in addition to choosing autoexposure also decided how to frame the shots, which lens to use, where to stand, and everything else salient to the artistry of photography -- all without direct human intervention, then I would think the situation would again be analogous. If the camera could do all that because an intern was holding it, the intern would still own the shots even if their employer gave them the assignment.
That's why the intern signs an employment contract that reassigns their rights to their employer!!
The elephant in the room, of course, is what constitutes “meaningful human authorship.” However, I cannot shake off the feeling that all user interactions with these AI models are being logged. Perhaps this may turn out to be the bigger concern in a potential legal battle than code authorship.
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That's quite impressive approach from the companies' perspective. Let's first use claude code and then we'll think who the code belongs to.
I think that the gold rush approach happening right now around me (my company EMs forcing me to work with claude as fast as possible) show really short-sight of all the management people.
First - I lose my understanding of the code base by relying too much on claude code.
Second - we drop all the good coding practices (like XP, code review etc.) because claude is reviewing claude's code.
Third - we just take a big smelly dump on the teamwork - it's easier and cheaper to let one developer drive the whole change from backend to frontend, despite there are (or were) two different teams - one for FE, one for BE.
Fourth - code commenting was passe, as the code is documentation itself... Unless... there is a problem with the context (which is). So when the people were writing the code, they would not understand the over-engineered code because of their fault. But now we make a step back for our beloved claude because it has small context... It's unfair treatment.
I could go on and on. And all those cultural changes are because of money. So I dub this "goldrush", open my popcorn and see what happens next.
The fourth point about code commenting is the one that connects directly to the ownership question. When developers write comments to explain intent, those comments are evidence of human creative direction. When Claude writes the code and the comments, and the developer merges without adding their own explanation of the architectural decisions, the record of human authorship disappears along with the institutional knowledge. The documentation problem and the copyright problem are the same problem.
> Third - we just take a big smelly dump on the teamwork - it's easier and cheaper to let one developer drive the whole change from backend to frontend, despite there are (or were) two different teams - one for FE, one for BE.
Agree with your other points, but IMO this one has always been better. You often need to design the backend and frontend to work with each other, and that requires a lot more coordination when it's separate teams.
Also, it's supremely easy do the wrong abstractions long term and compromise premature internal designs that will start to starve of human mental modeling, hence explaining with accountability how things work and what the plans are when an incident happens. Also, if the wrong generalizations are introduced, coded correctly and reviewed and approved by AIs, then who's even driving really?
I rarely see #3 yield better solutions, it's usually better to collaborate as a team on requirements and gotchas, but let one person own implementation.
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I think it should be pretty clear that if you provided the tool the specification for the code you want, you have already provided creative input.
After all, is this not what happens with compilers as well? LLM agents are just quite advanced compilers that don't require the specification to be as detailed as with traditional compilers.
The compiler analogy is the right one to reach for and the Copyright Office addressed it directly: the question is not whether you provided input, it is whether the creative expression in the output reflects human authorship. With a traditional compiler, the programmer authors every expression in the source. With an LLM, the programmer authors the intent and the model makes the expressive decisions about structure, naming, pattern, and implementation. Whether that distinction matters legally is what Allen v. Perlmutter is working through right now. The summary judgment briefing completed in early 2026 and it may be the next landmark ruling on exactly this question.
>it should be pretty clear that if you provided the tool the specification for the code you want, you have already provided creative input.
If you provided a human contractor with the specifications for the code you want, the courts have repeatedly made clear you have not provided the creative input from a copyright perspective, and the contractor needs to explicitly assign those rights to you if want to own the copyright on the code.
To me this is like asking who owns the binary files a compiler generates.
If you want to go much deeper, https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ is particularly good at least on the side of comprehensiveness.
I’m no lawyer but I feel that meta, my employer, wouldn’t be letting us go hog-wild with Claude code if they weren’t completely confident that they fully owned the outputs, whether we change it or not.
There’s so much FOMO right now around AI that no one is thinking clearly. I wouldn’t be so confident in your company.
Meta's confidence almost certainly rests on the employment contracts and IP assignment clauses, not on a legal theory that AI output is inherently copyrightable. The enterprise agreement with Anthropic assigns outputs to the licensee. The employment contract assigns work product to Meta. Those two documents together give Meta a defensible ownership position regardless of the authorship question. The interesting gap is for developers using personal accounts or consumer plans on side projects, where neither of those documents exists.
This is all well and good as an intellectual exercise, but in real life none of this matters. Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable or seriously thinks their code is a moat. I've written the same chunks of code for a number of employers as has every engineer. We've all taken chunks from stack overflow and other places without carefully considering attribution.
This comes up in a few places as a kind of vindictive battle. One example is Oracle suing Google for too closely mimicking their API in Android. Here is an example:
> private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
fromIndex + toIndex + ")"); }And it was deemed fair use by the Supreme Court. Other times high frequency hedge funds sued exiting employees, sometimes successfully. In America, anyone can sue you for any reason, so sure, you'll have Ellison take a feud up with Page and Brin all the way up to the Supreme Court.
In 99.9% of instances none of this matter. Sure there's the technical letter of the law but in practice, and especially now, none of this matters.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf
> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable
Every open source license is built on the premise that code is copyrightable.
> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable or seriously thinks their code is a moat.
You'd be surprised! Among non-software management types, they often think of the code as extremely valuable IP and a trade secret. I'm a CTO and I've made comments before to non/less technical peers about how the code (generally speaking) isn't that big of a secret, and I routinely get shocked expressions. In one case the company almost passed on a big contract because it required disclosure of the source code (with an NDA). When I told them that was a silly reason and explained why, they got it, but the old way of thinking still permeates and is a hard habit to break.
Edit: Fixed errant copy pasta error. Glad that wasn't a password :-)
Maybe LLM coding agents change the equation by making it much easier to adapt and use foreign and probably incomplete code. Getting you closer to competing with the original authors in a shorter amount of time than generating new code from scratch.
You're right, I guess maybe I mean in any serious actionable way. Senior, non technical people leave plenty of money on the table by thinking they're protecting something valuable or they have some kind of secret sauce. It's all silly is what I meant to say, and digging into the technicalities of whether your code is truly copyrightable is kind of pointless. It's all vibes.
The place where it concretely matters is M&A due diligence. Acquirers are now routinely asking about AI tool usage in development and running license scans as a condition of closing. A codebase that cannot demonstrate human authorship over its core IP, or that contains GPL contamination, creates a representation and warranty problem in the purchase agreement. For most companies day to day you are right. For the companies that get acquired or raise institutional capital, the question becomes very concrete very quickly.
Nobody ever talks about convergence.
You, right now, are taking about convergence.
If there is no artwork, there can be no copyright. If every character of the code to write is basically predetermined by the APIs you need to call, there is no artwork and no copyright.
Build a novel new API, and you'll be protected though.
Why were the HFT firms suing employees?
> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable
I think this is an unusual opinion.
Code may not be copyrightable in as small chunks as you put there, but in terms of larger pieces I think companies and individuals very often labour under the belief that code is intellectual property under copyright law.
If code isn't copyrightable, from where comes the GPL?
And why does anyone care if (for instance) some Microsoft code might have accidentally ended up in ReactOS, causing that project to need to go into a locked-down review mode for months or years? For that matter why do employers assert that they own the copyright in contracts?
I think it's the opposite - almost everyone thinks their code is copyrightable, outside of APIs and interop stuff, or things so simple as to be trivial.
> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable
Then why does reverse engineered code need to be a clean room implementation?
Ask any emulator developer or the developers of ReactOS
https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21740
Seems to gloss over other kinds of contamination, beyond GPL code. Code from pirated text books, the problem with the entire language model being trained on copyright data, and on the possibility of the training data containing various copyrighted code.
> Code from pirated text books
Anthropic "solved" this by intermingling the texts extracted from pirated books (illegal) with texts extracted from the physical books they bought and destroyed (legal), so no one can clearly say if the copyrighted material it spits out came from a legal source or not. Everyone rejoiced.
The intermingling argument is actually central to the Bartz settlement structure. The settlement required destruction of the pirated dataset specifically because commingled training data creates an unresolvable provenance problem. For deployers building on Claude, EDPB Opinion 28/2024 requires a documented assessment of the foundation model's training data legal basis before deployment. "We cannot tell which outputs came from which source" is not a satisfactory answer to a regulator running that assessment. wrote about it before here: https://legallayer.substack.com/p/i-read-every-edpb-document...
Nobody disputes that I own the copyright in a sound recording I made just by pushing the red button on my recorder. So it is a mystery to me that copyright to any sort of human conditioned machine generation is in dispute.
The sound recording analogy breaks down at the point where the recorder makes no creative decisions. Pressing record captures what is already there. Prompting Claude generates something that did not exist, through decisions the model makes about structure, naming, pattern, and implementation. The closer analogy is hiring a session musician and telling them the key and tempo. You own the recording under work-for-hire if they signed the right contract, but the creative expression in the performance is theirs unless explicitly assigned. The button you push to start the model is not the same button as the one on the recorder.
One question I have is this: if an employee produces code predominantly generated by AI, it means that it is not copyrightable. Does that mean that the employee can take that code and publish it on the Internet?
Or is it still IP even if it is not copyrightable? That would feel weird: if it's in the public domain, then it's not IP, is it?
That is exactly the right question and the answer is genuinely strange. Uncopyrightable work falls into the public domain, which means anyone can use it, copy it, or build on it freely. The employer can still call it a trade secret and protect it through confidentiality obligations in employment contracts, but that protection is contractual rather than property-based. A trade secret loses protection the moment it is disclosed. So the employer's claim over purely AI-generated code is essentially: "you cannot share this" rather than "we own this." Those are meaningfully different legal positions, and most companies have not thought through which one they actually have.
So employees are not allowed to distribute the code, but if it leaks, then it is public and the company cannot do anything about it. Correct? That's what happened to Anthropic I think?
A recipe isn't copyrightable but is still protected under trade secret law. I imagine that the same would apply. I think the major difference with software copyright is that I can just decompile your binary or copy a binary and give it to other people. For SAAS companies that don't distribute binaries, I imagine they basically have the same protections against rogue employees.
To look at it another way, just because some code I work on at my job is derived from open source MIT-licensed code doesn't mean I personally have the right to distribute it if my company doesn't want me to. I'd guess this comes under some generic "confidential information" clause in the employment contract.
Hmm your example is different: if you manually write code, there is a copyright for it whether it is derived from an MIT-licence or not. If you don't own that copyright (because your employer does), then you don't have the right to distribute it because it is not your code.
If you generate the same code with AI, now it does not have a copyright. If it depends on an MIT library, then the MIT library has a copyright and you have to honour the licence. But the code you produced does not have a copyright (because it was generated by an AI). And therefore nobody "owns" it. My question is: can your employer prevent you from distributing something they don't own?
Presumably company policy would be implicated here, not copyright law. Whether or not it's copyrightable, what you create using AI is work product.
Maybe the useful test is not “who wrote this line?” but “can you show how it went from requirement/prompt/context to diff to human review/tests?” If you can’t, ownership is only one issue. You also can’t tell what was accepted as engineering work versus just copied output.
This is actually closer to how the Copyright Office thinks about it than the article makes clear. The registration guidance that emerged from the Thaler proceedings specifically asks applicants to describe the human creative contributions and how the AI was used. A documented workflow showing requirement, architectural decision, rejection of AI output, human restructuring, and review creates a paper trail that maps directly onto what the Office looks for. The can you show how it got here test you are describing is the practical version of the legal standard.
Article is incredibly fear mongering.
Twice in my career the owners of a company have wanted to sue competitors for stealing their "product" after poaching our staff.
Each time, the lawyers came in and basically told us that suing them for copyright is suicide, will inevitably be nearly impossible to prove, and money would be better spent in many other areas.
In fact, we ended up suing them (and they settled) for stealing our copyrighted clinical content, which they copied so blatantly they left our own typos and customer support phone number in it.
Go ahead, try to sue over your copyrighted code, 10 years and 100M later you will end up like Google v Oracle. What if the code is even 5% different? What about elements dictated by external constraints; hardware, industry standards, common programming practices, these aren't copyrightable.
Then you have merger doctrine, how many ways can we really represent the same basic functions?
Same goes with the copyleft argument, "code resembling copyleft" is incredibly vague, it would need to be verbatim the code, not resembling. Then you have the history of copyleft, there have been many abuses of copyleft and only ~10 notable lawsuits. Now because AI wrote it (which makes it _even harder_ to enforce), we will see a sudden outburst of copyleft cases? I doubt it.
Ultimately anyone can sue you for any reason, nothing is stopping anyone right now from suing you claiming AI stole their copyleft code.
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This seems to be grounded in US law. Does anyone know if the same rules would apply in eg EU law?
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First answer who owns the model built with public data
The model ownership question and the output ownership question run on separate legal tracks and the piece focuses on the second deliberately. On the first: the model weights are owned by Anthropic under work-for-hire from their engineers regardless of what the training data contained. Training data copyright infringement is a separate tort claim against Anthropic, not a basis for anyone else to claim ownership of the model. The Bartz settlement resolved the pirated books claim without disturbing Anthropic's ownership of the weights. Owning the training data does not give you ownership of the model trained on it, any more than owning the paint gives you ownership of the painting.
The "if you generated the code at work using company tools, it's owned by your employer" affirmation in the article makes no sense to me?
If computer generated code is not copyrightable, ownership cannot be reassigned either.
It is copyrightable. A *human* can copyright code they wrote.
I meant in the sense that the "tool" is an LLM and the "work" was vibe coded.
If vibe coded work is not copyrightable, it cannot be reassigned to the employer and become copyright protected.
This is the sharpest point in the thread. You are right if the output has no copyright to begin with, there is nothing to assign. The employer's contractual claim over purely AI-generated code is not a copyright claim, it is a trade secret and confidentiality claim. Those are weaker protections: they require the information to remain secret, they do not survive disclosure, and they cannot be enforced against independent creation of the same code. Most IP assignment clauses in employment contracts were not drafted with this scenario in mind and may be claiming rights that do not legally exist.
correct
How is it for human developers now if the company tool is a cloud tool and not running on company servers?
It’s the same as photography. No photographer built the multibillion dollar supply chain for the optics train in a camera, nor did they build the city scape they are enjoying as a background, they simply set the stage and push a button.
I have a wood cutting machine and some wood. Who owns the timber?
Sadly, IP "ownership" and copyright law are vastly more complex than ownership of physical stuff.
Or were you planning to reproduce the (say) Ford Motor Company's trademarked symbol in wood? If so, you're right back in the stinkin' swamp.
What is the wood in your example?
This is like a machine you ask for timber and you get timber but you didn’t need to provide any wood
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