Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

When I'm feeding AI my code as input and it ends up producing new code which adheres to my architecture, my coding style and my detailed technical requirements, the copyright over the output should be mine since the code looks exactly like what I would have produced by hand, there is no creative input from the AI. It's just a code completion tool to save time.

I understand if someone leaves an LLM running as an agent for multiple days and it produces a whole bunch of code, then it's a very different process.

If I enter dark factory mode and go live my life while it churns tokens, then it's not copyrightable, but if I interact with it at every turn, then it is?

Basically all GPL code is available on the web and there is a vast amount of it. I barely see any current non-FOSS code on the internet, although I think it would be fair to count the big projects who have been using pseudo-OSS licenses lately as proprietary. Wouldn't a safer assumption be a ratio of 10:1 or 100:1 for lines of GPL vs. lines of "shared source?"

The case by case basis was about acquisition and possession of the copyrighted material. Anthropic pirated a large number of books and illegally stored digital copies of many that they did purchase legally. The training being protected doesn't give them the right to violate copyright in that way.

Google, for example, purchased print versions of their training material and had a small army of employees digitize them and then delete the digital copies when they were done. That hasn't been challenged AFAIK, but would likely have been found to be not a violation. That's I think what was meant by case by case basis.

It's like if someone breaks into my house and I shoot them with my gun, that's very likely self defense, but if I'm not allowed to own a gun, I may still end up in trouble with the law.

If Anthropic hadn’t pirated training materials would they even exist? Would they still have been as competitive ?

Would they still have gotten every bit of VC funding in anticipation of future successes derived in part from past crimes?

What’s next ? Armed bank robbery when VC funding dries up?

The provider of the LLM should want to enable this and to take on that responsibility (I mean take it from the clients), otherwise no one will want to use the tool. Maybe there could be AI tool-use lawsuit insurance, but I feel like that's worse than the copyright infringement detection tool for everyone involved.

I can see the tool happening in the EU, but nowhere else basically, especially in the US, the government sees "AI dominance" as a national priority and a national security priority.

That's why the intern signs an employment contract that reassigns their rights to their employer!!

Copy/pasting at scale, yes

I have seen LLMs do all sorts of crap which was clearly reproduction of training material.

This is also why people are most impressed with how much better it is at reproducing boilerplate rather than, say, imaginative new ideas.

The mental calisthenics required to justify this stuff must be exhausting.

It's perfectly reasonable to say it's okay for humans to do something but not okay for a computer program to do the same thing. We don't have to equate AI to humans, that's a choice and usually a bad one.

I mean I don't think think I could find a better description for following the derivatives of error in reproducing a set of works as creating a "derivative work".

Or is it "plagiarism"?

Are you for stealing and against learning?

We know exactly what is happening in both cases. We can talk about that, or we can use obfuscating euphemisms that make our preferred position seem obviously true.

The music and movie companies have power. They have the funds to bankrupt you with a small army of lawyers. You as an individual do not stand a chance against corporate lawyers. They can destroy your life over fairly minimal and non-violent offenses.

AI companies are backed by the very powerful. They can steal all they want and use the same army of lawyers to bankrupt any small rights holder. The big rights holders go to the same parties and allow it to happen.

Regardless of the actual take on copyright, both methods skullfuck the little guy without power.

People cry foul because, at least in the US, we claim to live in a free country based on equality, yet there is a very obvious caste system of the haves and the havenots.

It errodes the legitimacy of the system. Imagine if for years you see news reports of a mother getting a judgment against her where she owes 100s of thousands because she seeded a Brittany Spears song. Then you suddenly see the same laws that were leveraged to instill fear in you, tossed aside when the rich and powerful say it doesn't count anymore, you're going to cry foul!

It's not a hypocrisy of position on copyright, it's bearing witness to the illegitimacy of the laws they're bound by.

I'd prefer no copyright but we live in a world where there is copyright so its unfair that only AI companies get to be immune.

When it picks out a rare bit of code, it will be simply copying that code, illegally, and presenting it without attribution or any licenses which is in fact breaking the law but AI companies are too important for the law to apply to them.

There's been instances where models have spat out comments in code that mention original authors, etc., effectively outing itself as a copyright thief.

There's nothing anyone can do about it, but the suspicion is that the big companies have taken everyone's code on GitHub, without consent, and trained on it.

And now are spitting out big chunks of copyrighted code and presented it as somehow transformed even though all they've actually done is change a few variable names.

It is copyright theft, but because programmers are little people, not Disney, we don't have any recourse.

And so does well-crafted bespoke software.

The engineers who built the foundation for the industrial expansion of our forefathers went through the same exact thing we're going through now. They look at what existed, and use it to inform their efforts. This is what LLMs do.

I'm not attempting to moralize here, just comment on the parallels. Do I agree that a craftman's work is consumed by the juggernauts and no second thought is given? No. I think its a shame. But I also think the output will never match the artisans that practice now. By the very nature of the machines we employ, we cannot match the skill or thought that goes into bespoke code.

The UK works under the "sweat of the brow" doctrine for copyright. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

    Under a "sweat of the brow" doctrine, the creator of a work, even if it is completely unoriginal, is entitled to have that effort and expense protected; no one else may use such a work without permission, but must instead recreate the work by independent research or effort. The classic example is a telephone directory. In a "sweat of the brow" jurisdiction, such a directory may not be copied, but instead a competitor must independently collect the information to issue a competing directory. The same rule generally applies to databases and lists of facts.

The inclusion of "human" is important there. https://copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-auth... - the human authorship is mentioned several times.

    306 The Human Authorship Requirement

    The U.S. Copyright Office will register an original work of authorship, provided that the work was created by a human being. The copyright law only protects “the fruits of intellectual labor” that “are founded in the creative powers of the mind.” Trade-Mark Cases, 100 U.S. 82, 94 (1879). Because copyright law is limited to “original intellectual conceptions of the author,” the Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work. Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53, 58 (1884). For representative examples of works that do not satisfy this requirement, see Section 313.2 below.

    313.2 Works That Lack Human Authorship

    As discussed in Section 306, the Copyright Act protects “original works of authorship.” 17 U.S.C. § 102(a) (emphasis added). To qualify as a work of “authorship” a work must be created by a human being. See Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co., 111 U.S. at 58. Works that do not satisfy this requirement are not copyrightable.

    ...

    Similarly, the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author. The crucial question is “whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.”

The prompts may be copyrightable... but the output if you don't go in and fix it up and provide that minimal amount of human originality to it? That appears to still be an open question of law in the United States.

Are you telling me that I can use the thing, but I can't use it if I process it through an LLM? It get slippery, fast.

There's also a TON of irony here. What an about face it is, for the community at large* to switch from "information wants to be free, we support copyleft and FOSS" to leaning so heavily on an incredibly conservative reading of IP law.

We gave certain temporary monopoly on certain uses to humans under rules little understood by laymen even if their livelihood depends on it.

It turns out that's false. We know that genes are patentable; remember back during the Human Genome Project, when there was such a rush to patent them? So genes are IP. (This seems bizarre to me, since they're patenting something that was found just sitting there, but this is what the system says right now.)

Well, two other humans (aka mom and dad) did create me, based on those patentable genes (and most likely including some genes that were, in fact, patented).

I'm not sure what to conclude from all of that, but I do think that it invalidates your argument.

See:

https://technophilosoph.com/en/2025/02/07/ai-prompts-and-out...

If you have a more recent citation referring to case law that states the opposite then that would be great but afaik this article reflects the current state of affairs.

The human using the tool creates a prompt, there is then an automatic transformation of the prompt into code. Such automatic transformation is generally accepted as not to create a new work (after all, anybody else inputting the same prompt would have a reasonable expectation of generating the same output modulo some noise due to versioning and possibly other local context).

Claud code and in general AI generated code does not at present create a new work. But the prompt, that part which you input may be sufficiently creative to warrant copyright protection.

Compilation and translation happen in a generic manner and does not rely on a mountain of other IP, it is really just a transformative tool that happens to do something useful, someone constructed it to be a very precise translation to the point that any mistakes in it are called bugs and we fix them to ensure the process stays deterministic. Translators try hard to 'get it right' too: to affect the intentions of the original author as little as possible.

When you use a model loaded up with noise or that you have trained exclusively on code that you actually wrote I think a strong case could be made that you own the copyright on that work product. But when you train that model on other people's work, especially without their consent or use a model that has been trained in that way you lose your right to call the output of that model yours.

You did not write it, and the transformative process requires terabytes of other people's IP and only a little bit by you.

As soon as you can prove that your contribution substantially outweighs the amount of IP contributed in total you would have a much stronger case.

If the compiled binaries (output) were produced by running the input (source code) over every program written, then sure.

But that's not what's happening with compilers, is it? The output of a prompt is dependent on copyrighted work of others every single time it is run.

The output of a compiler is not dependent on the copyright output of every other program.

In order to have a sane conversation about this we have to all agree not to lie.

I think what this means is that the employee may not be the copyright owner for multiple reasons, which are possibly applicable simultaneously. It does not imply that the employer owns copyright over the work that is in public domain, which would be a contradiction.

Under at least EU AI Act, any work done by AI is not granted copyright. But it does not mean copyright does not apply, it means the amount of work credited to AI is set at 0% (simplification). A human working off another's work unless it's perfect copy will have "credit" for changes that are judged creative/transformative, meaning a human plagiarizing something still can claim to have some degree of authorship. An AI won't.

In a sense, the copyright status of final work is a sort of "sum with dilution" were each work involved adds to claims, but AI's output is set at 0 - the prompt or further rework by human is not.

As for employer, details vary but generally "work for hire" rules and contracts do reassignment of material rights (in EU and some other places you can not reassign moral rights which are a different thing).

The LLM is not employed by you or your employer, because you can't enter contracts with non human or non human organizations.

When you license a non-LLM code generation service (like a page that creates a website for you), that company owns the copyright of the generated website because their deterministic system generated code by defined rules and mechanisms that were defined by the code generation system. Assuming no LLM as part of that, there is no code that is generated by the system outside of the rules that they defined (it's not filling in the blanks that you or the code generation system didn't explicitly define).

Since they own the copyright of the website, they can then assign the copyright and authorship to you because of your license agreement to them.

Since the LLM is filling in the blanks on its own in undefined ways, it is the author and not Anthropic/OpenAI/ETC. That means that even though you have a license agreement with Anthropic/OpenAI/etc.. to transfer copyright, they didn't have copyright/authorship, the LLM did. And since the LLM can't legally own copyright/authorship (since it isn't a human) then it can't grant it to you and you can't then grant it to your employer.

There problem is the LLM is still making assumptions on that line of code and thus it's still the main author (based on existing case law and the copyright office's opinion currently).

The markdown case is definitely more like the case I cited where the supreme court decided that specficiations and back and forth do not mean it's a deritive work and thus the actual implementor is the author, not the spec writer.

In any case, the corporation did not create the product, people created it and their contractual relationship with the corporation defined how the ownership of that work was managed. So, I don't find it too unusual that this element of personhood is available to corporations.

The employees and contractors are the authors, and because of the contract they sign they assign copyright to the corporation. Corporations, as a collection of humans are allowed to have authorship.

LLMs are not companies and they are not humans in any way shape or form, and thus cannot get copyright nor grant copyright to a third party.

<https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102>.

It's not that corporations can't hold copyright. But a corporation cannot mechanically create "original works of authorship" by a purely mechanical process. That process is limited to human authors. "Works for hire" would be a common case of a human creator (author) resulting in a corporate assignment (ownership), see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire>.

Notably cases:

- The "monkey selfie" copyright case, in which photographer David Slater arranged for monkeys to take selfies. Copyright ownership denied by both the US Copyright Office (against Slater's claim) and (in a separate case arguing the monkey should hold copyright) by an appellate court: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...>, Naruto v. Slater, No. 16‑CV‑00063 (N.D. Cal. 2016).

- Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991). Simple compilations are not copyrightable regardless of whether created by humans.

- THALER v. PERLMUTTER (2023). "[T]his case presents only the question of whether a work generated autonomously by a computer system is eligible for copyright. In the absence of any human involvement in the creation of the work, the clear and straightforward answer is the one given by the Register: No." <https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-dis-crt-dis-col/1149169...>.

LLMs are amazing of course and we use them heavily ourselves - but not for modifying text that is to be posted to HN. Doing so leaves imprints on the language that readers are increasingly becoming allergic to, and we want HN to be a place human conversation.

Not really. Copyright registration is pretty much automatic. The Copyright Office does not check for duplicates. Patent registration involves actual examination for patentability. Issued patents are presumed valid (less so than they used to be), but issued copyrights are not. You have to litigate.

The US does not have "sweat of the brow" copyrights. It's the "spark" that creates the originality, not the work. Which is why you can't copyright a telephone directory (Feist vs. Rural Telephone) or a copy of an uncopyrighted image (Bridgeman vs. Corel) or a scan of a 3D object (Meshwerks vs. Toyota). Or the contents of a database as a collective work. Note that some EU countries do allow database copyright.

Interestingly, a corporation can be an author for copyright purposes. The movie industry pushed for that. We may in time see AI corporate personhood for IP purposes.

“ Copyright <YEAR> <COPYRIGHT HOLDER>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.”

The copyright assertion is the very first line of the MIT license, and the right to copy the code is granted. Clearly a reasonable person would affirm that that license (and all similar licenses) are based on a premise that code can be copyrighted.

> It is based on the premise that if the proprietary licenses are valid, then also the open source licenses are valid.

>If the proprietary licenses are not valid, then it does not matter that also the open source licenses are not valid.

That’s not true. Imagine a world where proprietary licenses are made invalid.

In such a world a company could take open source code compile it and distribute it (or build a SaaS) without the source code.

Even if you only focus on licenses that don’t prohibit this, most of those licenses require attribution.

So even in a world where propriety licenses were invalid the majority of open source licenses would still have a purpose.

You’re attempting to split hairs to argue on a very subtle technicality, but you’re not even technically right.

So, in your example, the specifiers would own the specification, the programmers the C code, and machine encoders own the machine code.

But the ownership wouldn't be complete. If you sell the machine code, you'd have to pay royalties to all three. If you only sold the C code, only to the specifiers and the programmers.

I think from this view it makes sense that an LLM is a tool, and the operator of that tool (or their employer) can own the output.

The tricky part is when you squint and view an LLM with training input and prompted output as a machine that launders copyrighted input into customized output that is now copyrighted by a new owner.

A machine that vacuums up film reels and splices them according to a set of instructions by the user to create a compilation of recent animated Disney movies with the Shrek soundtrack superimposed would probably not pass legal challenges if the user of the tool attempted to claim full copyright on the output.

a copyrightable expression of human creativity in that case would need to be substantial enough in size to carry an imprint exlusive to your boss.

"why'd the chicken cross the road? to get to the other side" is not copyrightable. you can dress it up all you want, "why didst thy chickencock traverseth thee highway?..." etc would not qualify as something that would be exclusively yours/your bosses, because that trick is still rote.

BUT:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways I like to see you work.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height and number of your pull requests

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight of your overnight toils

For the ends of being and ideal grace you provide me when you ship!

(i'm just extending each line of Elizabeth Barrett Browning https://poets.org/poem/how-do-i-love-thee-sonnet-43 )

that would be copyrightable if it was original to your boss.

The law and interpretation of the law does not have the tidy and necessary obsession with fencepost errors and corner cases. It deals with them by stepping back and saying "what would an ordinary person think should be copyrightable vs what would be more akin to the wordgames that clever nerds on the playground get beat up for?

That makes no sense because what if you refactor your code ad infinitum using AI? You spin up a working implementation, then read through the code, catalog the changes like interface, docs, code quality and patterns and delegate to the AI to write what you would.

It's 100% AI code and it's 100% human code. That distinction is what's counterproductive.

There’s a very accessible summary of the United States rules here:

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf

CC0 came about in part because of this ambiguity. To deal with it, part of CC0 basically says - even if there would still be restrictions to this if it were only in the public domain, I renounce those theoretical rights.

Outside the underdeveloped legal framework, I believe knowledge and truth is like life, and human society has some continued philosophical growth required here.

And yet that was the state of software at every company I worked at before FAANG, and even a good amount there...

I mean if the code is not copyrighteable that does not mean anything; it's just public domain code except that meta will just use good old security by obscurity to protect it. If somehow a meta programmer vibes code, say, VVVVVV, and Terry Cavanagh recognizes it on his facebook feed and sues meta, and wins, all that will happen is that meta will take down the copy of VVVVVV, will fire and sue the engineer that vibe coded it and call it a day.

The judge seems to have said it's because they "transformed" the books (destroying them after digitalizing) in the process, that made it legal.

> Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use—but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. The judge compared the process to “conserv[ing] space” through format conversion and found it transformative. - https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...

If I painstakingly recreate A New Hope frame by frame, pixel by pixel, that's infringement. Even if I technically used 0 content from the original.

I can't speak for all licenses, but I'm familiar with at least one BSD license. That's almost the entire point of it...

You cannot take their literal code and call it your own. You can derive code from it and call it your own. That's what LLMs primarily do.

And?

>It would be as ridiculous as blaming the car in a car accident where you drove over someone.

No more ridiculous than you posting something you know nothing about.

Just because you don't get the copyright doesn't mean claude does. The fact that claude is not a legal entity has no bearing on whether or not you are entitled to a copyright for a work you did not create.