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Comment by smokel | Hacker News Reader

> Open source, MIT licensed.

I don't think that is how copyright licensing works.

Isn't it, though? What's the copyright status of the output of these tools?

If this is regular output of the LLM, I'm not sure, but given that the author proclaims that this is reverse engineered, then they are not allowed to redistribute it under their own license terms. The terms of service are also pretty clear on this not being allowed, which makes it extra hard to defend (section 3.3):

> You may not access or use, or help another person to access or use, our Services in the following ways:

...

3. To decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise reduce our Services to human-readable form, except when these restrictions are prohibited by applicable law. [1]

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms

How can you tell what regular output is? Is there a special output when you successfully jailbreak? Is there a meaningful distinction between jailbroken prompts and hallucinations? Are certain prompts against the terms of service? If so, is it easy to determine if they are? Who determines this? If you produce output that is against the terms of service, does that change the copyright status of the works?

I'd love to see this go to court.

The terms of service are between Anthropic and one of their subscribers. So Anthropic can maybe cancel their contract.

This doesn't affect what copyright law allows or does not allow.

Also I think Anthropic very much suppports gathering data by whatever means possible. That should work both ways.

It does make a difference. If this text was generated by the LLM, then by those same terms you are allowed to publish the data. But given that it is reverse engineered, you are not allowed to do so.

Note that even in the normal case, there are restrictions. You'd have to validate that the generated output is not copyrighted. Which in this case may not be trivial.

What do you mean? https://opensource.org/license/mit

You cannot claim authorship of something that you were not even allowed to take in the first place. How would you then allow rights to somebody else?

Seems pretty obvious to me.

Oh you’re assuming the content in this repo is taken from somewhere? There are other sibling threads about this; you might be mis-interpreting the title.

The GitHub page clearly states that it is reverse engineered.

Even if you rewrite an article in your own words, you cannot claim copyright for that. At least, not to my knowledge.

Oh you’re right, sorry! Well unless the Claude Design prompt is open source licensed, then correct, it’s not legal to publish it under an open license. That would be a copyright violation.

In general I agree with you, especially about how things should work, and find the current trend of claiming LLM-washing code hugely problematic.

I do wonder what the analysis would be of these prompts were vibe-coded, though, since in general LLM output can’t be copyrighted without significant human authorship, and Anthropic is pretty noisy about minimal human supervision.

The minimal human supervision for prompts seems like a pretty silly take. LLMs are still pretty bad at creating good prompts for LLMs. Give it a benchmark and some feedback and it can brute force it, but far less effectively. And I thought the point of using LLMs for development was increased efficiency.

My independent judgement and experience is along your lines, but I’m trying to also take Anthropic seriously:

> “I don’t prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops.”

> “Can confirm Claude Code is 100% written by Claude Code”

Both from head of Claude Code. Taken either literally or seriously they point to Anthropic shipping code with limited human authorship.

Oh I certainly believe them. And on some level I admire the dogfooding. It just seems awful foolish of them.

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