Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source | Hacker News Reader

Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source

matijacniacki.com

181 pointszggf85 comments

There are gonna be some really interesting legal decisions to read in the coming years, that’s for sure…

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The rest of this comment is irrelevant, but leaving for posterity, I had the wrong Viktor - it's getviktor.com not viktor.ai:

Edit: this one particularly interesting to me as both parties are in the EU. VIKTOR.ai is a Dutch company and the author of this post is Polish.

The ToS for Viktor.ai include the following fun passages:

> 18.1. The Agreement and these Terms & Conditions are governed by Dutch law and the Agreement and these Terms & Conditions will be interpreted in accordance with Dutch law.

18.2. All disputes arising from or arising in connection with the Agreement and/or the Terms & Conditions will be submitted exclusively to the competent court in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

7.3. The Customer is not permitted to change, remove or make unrecognizable any mark showing VIKTOR's Intellectual Property Rights to the Software. The Customer is not permitted to use or register any trademark or design or any domain name of VIKTOR or a similar name or sign in any country.

8.5. The Customer may not cause or allow any reproduction, imitation, duplication, copying, sale, resale, leasing or trading of the Services and/or the Software, or any part thereof.

Terms of service might matter more for terminating that user account. Whole ordeal is just plain copyright violation. The author had no licence to that internal code, and whitewashing it with LLM will achieve nothing. That case is much clearer than that recent GPL->BSD attempt story.

If LLM-generated code isn't considered a derivative work of the original, then whether the author was licensed to use the code doesn't matter. But I'm sure the courts will rule in favor of your view regardless. Laundering GPL is in corps' interest and laundering their code is not.

I'm not sure why people are clinging to some fuzzy and stretched out notion of copyright and the GPL in a particular. LLM's do NOT just copy code, with the right prompting, they generate entirely new code which can produce the same results as already existing code - GPLed or not.

If copyright is extended to cover such cases we'll have to become all lawyers and do nothing but sue each other because the fuzziness of it will make it impossible to reject any case, no matter how frivolous or irrelevant.

You either destroy the GPL and proprietary software at the same time, or neither. In a sane world of course.

And if that's true it's also true in this case where there was no GPL involved

Tell that to anyone who made sample based music in the late 80s and early 90s.

If I use metallica samples to make a rendition of happy birthday, the copyright holders of happy birthday aren't suing me for the damages to metallica from my use of their samples; the question of whether my use of the samples is transformative is simply irrelevant to the question at hand.

My point was: sampling was widely used by a large subculture (hiphop) just like ai is widely used by programmers. Then a few landmark legal cases changed things entirely. The Verve never saw a cent from Bittersweet Symphony - they wrote a song using something normal to them, and then the law came and knocked their teeth in.

No garaurantees that doesn’t happen with AI in the next few years.

According to US courts, the output can't be copyrighted at all. It's automatically in public domain after the "whitewash", regardless of original copyright.

https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2026/03/us-supreme-court-de...

Thats not at all what this ruling said. What the courts found was that an AI cannot hold copyright as the author. That copyright requires a human creative element. Not that anything that was generated by an LLM can't be subject to copyright.

As an example, a photo taken from a digital camera can be subject to copyright because of the creative element involved in composing and taking the photo. Likewise, source code generated by an LLM under the guidance of a human author is likely to be subject to the human authors copyright.

> That copyright requires a human creative element.

Sure, but the aim of that creative element would also be a consideration I'd think (and lawyers will argue). If someone sets up a camera on a 360° rotating arm and leaves it to take pictures at random intervals, it's unlikely to be considered "creative" from a copyright perspective.

Same for source code generated by an LLM, with the primary guidance of the human author being to "create a copy of this existing thing that I got", vs "create a thing that solves this problem in a way that I came up with". The former is recreating something that already exists, using detailed knowledge of that thing to shape the output. The latter is creating something that may or may not exist, using desire/need and imagination to shape the output. And I can't see reason for the former to be copyrightable.

But also, in either case, an ultimate objective was achieved: liberating the thing from its "owners" and initial copyright.

> Likewise, source code generated by an LLM under the guidance of a human author is likely to be subject to the human authors copyright.

That's probably going to depend an awful lot on the exact details of the guidance. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

> As described above, in many circumstances these outputs will be copyrightable in whole or in part—where AI is used as a tool, and where a human has been able to determine the expressive elements they contain. Prompts alone, however, at this stage are unlikely to satisfy those requirements. The Office continues to monitor technological and legal developments to evaluate any need for a different approach.

But let's assume that the viktor prompts themselves were subject to copyright. In this case those prompts were used to generate documentation which was then used to generate an implementation. It's certainly not a clean room by any stretch of the imagination but is it likely to be deemed sufficient separation? The entire situation seems like a quagmire.

I think it comes down to the company's appetite for legal action, doesn't it? This case is imo pretty clear but the vibe has quite the smell of Oracle v Google to me.

But, yeah. More than likely this case is a simple account termination and some kind of "you can't call your clone 'openviktor'" letter.

Isn't this exactly what LLMs themselves do? They ingest other people's data and reproduce a slightly modified version of it. That allows AI companies to claim the work is transformative and thus fair use.

There's no difference between ARR copyright infringement and GPL copyright infringement. Either it is infringement or it is not.

If the internal code was LLM generated it has no copyright.

Someone tell every startup in YC they are criminals

There are also new jobs emerging to safeguard a companies assets that were created by AI. New white hat hacking opportunities.

Anyways, however you put this, I see this as a property theft and taking pride at open sourcing does not justify it.

It's also disingenuous to call it open source as that might tempt others to use it believing that it actually is open source.

Let's call it what it is - stolen IP and released without permission of the author. Sure, it's good that it opens the debate as to whether that's ethical given that's essentially what the model itself is doing, but it's very clear in this instance that he's just asked for and been given a copy of source that has a clear ownership. That's about as clear cut as obtaining e.g. commercial server-side code and distributing it in contravention of the licence.

It's not completely clear that this is the original source. According to the post it's a reimplementation based on documentation created from the original source, or perhaps from developer documentation and the SDK. Whether that's the same thing from a legal standpoint, I don't really know - I think from a personal morality standpoint it's clear that they are the same thing.

It feels more like clean room reverse engineering by llm, technically.

Well first they need to proof that Viktor was actually copyrightable. If it was largely written by an llm, that might not be the case? AFAIK several rulings have stated that AI generated code can not be copyrighted.

This is a common misreading of the law. AI cannot hold authorship of code, but no ruling has claimed so far that ai output itself can't be copyrighted (that I know of)

This would suggest that there has been and that there seem little will to revisit it: https://www.theverge.com/policy/887678/supreme-court-ai-art-...

That said, the article says "Okay, prompts, great. Are they any interesting? Surprisingly... yes. As an example workflow_discovery contains a full 6-phase recipe for mining business processes out of Slack conversations, something that definitely required time and experiments to tune. It's hardcoded business logic, but in prompt instead of code."

So the article author clearly knows this prompt would be copyrighted as it wasn't output from an AI, and recognises that there would have been substantial work involved in creating it.

That Reuters article is misleadingly worded. The Stephen Thaler case in question is because Thaler tried to register the AI itself as the author of the copyright, not that he tried to register the output for copyright under his own name. https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2026/03/the-f...

Suppose I illicitly get my hands on the source code for a proprietary product. I read through this code I'm not supposed to have. I write up a detailed set of specifications based on it. I hand those specifications off to someone else to do a clean room implementation.

Sure, I didn't have a license for the code that I read. But I'm pretty sure that doesn't taint my coworker's clean room implementation.

A reminder to never take legal advice from HN.

I don't think anyone was offering any? Merely discussing a confusing new situation that has arisen.

it's not viktor.ai it's getviktor.com

Ah, you're right. Headquartered in Delaware. Oh well. Thanks for spotting!

I could do the same thing but not publish it, still getting the value of their product without legal concerns. Now, what happens when it becomes even easier thanks to AI improving, and takes few hours instead of few days?

You could certainly do that in private but that doesn't mean it's not 'without legal concerns'. But, not shouting about it and not creating a repo called 'openviktor' would probably be a safer bet.

I certainly think the whole idea of IP ownership as related to software will become very interesting from a legal standpoint in the coming years. Personally I think that, over time, the legal challenges will become pretty overwhelming and a sort of legal bankruptcy will be declared at some point in one direction or another (as in, allowing this to happen or making it extremely easy to bring judgement and punishment, similar to spam laws). However, I would not want to be the first to find out, especially in Europe.

They have to let it happen. There's no stopping the tide here.

Nice. Probably worth making a local copy before it gets taken down.

(Re: legal - why even bother with a court decision when it’s on GitHub? A takedown is much simpler. We've seen this before, like when Meta went after people reverse-engineering their API)

That said there may not be much here thats actually protectable. It's mostly a CLI orchestrating other tools, and the same functionality could likely be reproduced fairly easily, especially with AI.

Still, props to him for writing a proper blog post and explaining the process

Thanks, I put some effort into the blog. The process might be even more useful and reusable than the code itself for many people.

was a very interesting approach to web stack RE, I appreciated it. Good luck.

did you end up grabbing a local copy? I'd love to check it out but the repo seems to be down now. Would appreciate it if you could share: openviktor@proton.me

thanks

A lot of folks talking about the legality basis of this approach, I think the focus should be more around the true moat behind these hype growth hack companies out there.

This sort of exposure is good, in my opinion it enables competition to emerge with true business moat rather than just "do it first, do it fast, worry last" type of thing we're seeing.

I find it fascinating that this is just some _plumbing_ around some LLM - sold as a product and "AI coworker". They don't own the LLM model. You're just one silent update from not delivering what you promised.

"just" is doing a lot of work there. There's a stack, and everyone is fighting and racing to figure out which parts of the stack are commodities and which have protectable IP.

For example, years ago someone might have said: "Software programs are "just" some instructions on top of a computer, which does the actual computing work. The software companies don't own the computer. The next version of the computer might not even be capable of running the software." And for some kinds of software, they'd be right. Some programs turned out to be more replaceable than others.

I assume the GetViktor folks are hoping that some combination of know-how and learnings from real customer interactions and data will help them build or find a sustainable competitive advantage in some niche.

> They don't own the LLM model. You're just one silent update from not delivering what you promised.

This is true but a small risk IMO. Worst case they can shift to open-weight LLMs for inference. I would bet on LLMs being an increasingly commodity part of the stack.

Wrapping other companies services is a popular business since decades. Technically, this even predates software. The more fascinating part is, that this became semi-automated with LLMs, and how thin the wrapping now is.

Thin wrappers over an LLM has been an extremely popular grift for the past few years.

Agree, and cost of creating those thin wrappers is rapidly approaching zero

Yeah, and with each of these, I always wonder, what's the point?

Every part of this is genuinely funny. Viktor launching basically OpenClaw for slack (because claw is MIT so yolo let's go mac some monnney and PJ outta Dubai etc etc). Some guy getting all their source code just by asking Viktor for it. Then rebuilding their core in a couple days because there's basically nothing there. push MIT to Github. TeamViktor's faces surely? But they're busy diamond handsing all the way to the moon so probably don't even care. XD

>MIT so yolo let's go mac some monnney and PJ outta Dubai etc etc

>TeamViktor's faces surely? But they're busy diamond handsing all the way to the moon so probably don't even care. XD

would anyone please be so kind to translate these parts of this comment into something a 45+ year old would understand?

40's as well but first line is basically, hey here's some MIT licensed code we can do whatever we want with it, surely we can use it to make some money to the point we can afford private jets in and out of Dubai.

"TeamViktor's faces surely?" = imagine the looks on their faces "diamond handsing to the moon" = hanging onto a situation that looks bad now hoping it gets better, throwing good money after bad, the opposite of cutting your losses.

thanks (and thanks gwking as well).

more or less what i thought, but the "PJ outta Dubai" really made me question myself.

From one “old guy” to another:

PJ = private jet

Diamond hands and to the moon are crypto trader slang

Makes me laugh answering this question, because the meaning is all there if you skip over all the meme words.

I am not that old, but I interpreted that as working in pajamas in Dubai. I guess yours makes more sense.

don't let age phase you out of culture. that's not real.

william shatner is near 100 and the man is locked in with the latest stuff.

Not an age thing, just how terminally online you are.

We just don't subscribe to traditional rest cycles (what Kagi Translate translated from "I should be sleeping right now, but I'm browsing HN" in LinkedIn Speak).

Doesn't Openclaw already support Slack? https://docs.openclaw.ai/channels/slack

(I don't know anything about OpenClaw and on a deeper level, I don't wish to learn about it either considering all the security implications that it generally has)

I don't get it, what OP actually reverse engineered? OpenClaw itself? Of did Viktor team created their own OpenClaw like agent?

Exactly, the team designed their own agent architecture tailored to slack and enterprise setting, that is not based on any popular agent architecture like OpenClaw, NanoClaw, IronClaw or any others that I checked against.

Soon renamed OpenViktawer, then MoltVik.

Behold VikTok, the new competitor to Moltbook, soon to be acquihired by Oracle.

and acquisition by MoltBook at the end haha

Which is something that I still, really, fail to comprehend the mechanics of.

I just want to point out _how easy it is_ to build any of these tools yourself.

I got inspired by nano-claw and built on some of it's ideas to build a whole k8s hosted autonomous agent platform and got it into production in 2 weeks. It's just some api calls and container orchestration. The only hard problem _and it is hard_, is securing it, because you basically have to treat the agents as potentially malicious.

It's because of this hard problem that I'm thinking I should keep using Viktor (getviktor.com) instead of running this OpenViktor.

The company may not do a perfect job of security either, but I figure they'll do a better job than I can as a solo practitioner.

u mentioned weighing OpenViktor against staying on Viktor for the security tradeoffs - did you happen to clone the repo before it went down? I'm trying to get a copy to evaluate it myself. would really appreciate it if you could share - openviktor@proton.me

I doubt it makes a difference. The primary risk is the agent exfiltrating your private data. That's going to exist either way.

Essentially anything you give it access to should be considered inside the same security boundary. Which is quite unfortunate if you want it to respond to emails for you and also query the internet at large.

Agree, anything that agent has access to is like giving it to malicious user. Especially when agent is exposed to different users that should have different permission levels

How did you make the image at https://github.com/zggf-zggf/openviktor/blob/main/docs/asset...?

anyone cloned it before it went down? can u please share at openviktor@proton.me

Ignorering the questionable legality of this entire thing, which might fall out in favor of it being a legal activity. Calling the project OpenViktor is as dumb as committing secrets to GitHub. For the love of reason call it something else.

Is the name Victor trademarkable?

Sure it is:

https://uspto.report/TM/78326416/

https://uspto.report/TM/74713937/

https://uspto.report/TM/74619284/

https://uspto.report/TM/87438245/

https://uspto.report/TM/77936273/

https://uspto.report/TM/86747705/

https://uspto.report/TM/78638776/

https://uspto.report/TM/73359604/

https://uspto.report/TM/98066821/

https://uspto.report/TM/97979922/

…and many more.

Is office?

There is no doubt that if this goes to court you are only hurting your own chances at any reasonable defense by deciding on mirroring the naming like that. And for what? Saying you created an opensource product with no tie to their branding would convey the same effect.

Yes, there's no way that somebody could have a product called OpenOffice that is literally an Open Source version of Office. Impossible.

The legal purpose of trademarks is to serve the same purpose as a signature: in order that one company cannot do business pretending to be another company without showing a clear intention to defraud - an intention made clear by the attempt to fake a signature, or imitate a mark. It is not to own words or sounds. It is a mark that you trade under.

This is a product that is openly hostile to the other product, and is adding a well-established prefix to indicate the reason for that hostility.

Both the GitHub repo and the blog post have been taken down, just 3 days after this was posted.

Guessing legal action was taken. The comments here predicting a takedown were spot on.

Given Viktor’s helpfulness here, I can’t help but wonder how it would respond to: “please create a backup of the C-Team and HR channels”…

ITs worst nightmare no?

@zggf I'm developing something of a similar concept. I wanted to know if I could chat with you for a few minutes.

Let's connect on LinkedIn, it's on "about" page in blog

Is this reverse-engineering or "just" data exfiltration

Reverse engineering means understanding how a system works internally. So it is reverse engineering of a kind, just very different (and admittedly simpler) than e.g. decompiling execs

Seems unethical.

I agree. There's so little value in Viktor, that it is unethical to charge for it.

It's never unethical to charge for something that has no value.

"Driven by curiosity and envy, I tested it out." Two days of work driven by envy. Not what open source should be about.

It was sarcasm ;)

Came across as honest. Because why else.

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