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?

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.

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.

Ok what about all the Anthropic’s engineers who say they don’t write code at all and it’s 100% AI-generated?

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.

> 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.

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 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.

> 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

> 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 :-)

> 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.

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?

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

It is copyrightable. A *human* can copyright code they wrote.

How is it for human developers now if the company tool is a cloud tool and not running on company servers?

To me this is like asking who owns the binary files a compiler generates.

>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 agree with you, though I feel like some of the recent stuff I’ve made with Claude code it’s more like I’ve given a bit of configuration info but it’s chosen all of the defaults, and I’m a fairly minor contributor. All the look and feel (for the kind of apps I write with it) is chosen by Claude (by Anthropics data labelers), it’s just the broad strokes that come from me. So I wouldn’t really consider myself to have even contributed the majority of the creative input.

Obviously depends widely on the nature of what you’re building and how good you are with the default decisions it makes.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

Presumably company policy would be implicated here, not copyright law. Whether or not it's copyrightable, what you create using AI is work product.

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.

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.