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this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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As much as I wish this was true, I don't really think it is.
It's just unsettled law, and the link is basically an opinion piece. But guess who wins major legal battles like this - yep, the big corps. There's only one way this is going to go for AI generated code
Worst case is that its the owner of the agent that recieves the copyright, so all vibe coded stuff outside local ai will be claimed by the big corpos
I actually think that's the best case because it would kill enterprise adoption of AI overnight. All the corps with in-house AI keep using and pushing it, but every small to medium business that isn't running AI locally will throw it out like yesterday's trash. OpenAI's stock price will soar and then plummet.
The big AI companies would just come out with a business subscription that explicitly gives you copyright.
Damn
Unlikely since, as you say, it would deter business. OpenAI already assigns rights of output to the end user according to their licensing and terms.
No attempt to argue with you, personally is intended here. But your comment raises another question that I’m not sure the law has answered yet.
What rights does OpenAI have in the output of ChatGPT in the first place? Because if the answer is “Not much” then their transfer of rights to the output to the user doesn’t necessarily mean much.
After all, OpenAI can only transfer rights that they have. If they don’t have any to begin with… 🤷♂️
Yep, totally fair question, and one that's being tested legally on many fronts. Rulings are generally siding with AI companies on the training side (using copyrighted works to train models is fair use) but there aren't many decisions yet about output. The next few years will be interesting.
One would hope it could be first tested against a small time company that can't afford a good lawyer
Sadly, any lawsuit that opposed AI will have an army of lawyers defending the AI company.
Precedent affects all, and big companies know this.
It is true that AI work (and anything derived from it that isn't significantly transformative) is public domain. That said, the copyright of code that is a mix of AI and human is much more legally grey.
In other work, where it can be more separated, individual elements may have different copyright. For example, a comic was made using AI generated images. It was ruled that all the images were thus public domain. Despite that, the text and the layout of the comic was human-made and so the copyright to that was owned by the author. Code, obviously can't be so easily divided up, and it will be much harder to define what is transformative or not. As such, its a legal grey area that will probably depend on a case-by-case basis.
Yeah, it's like products that include FOSS in them, only have to release the FOSS stuff, not their proprietary. (Was kind of cute to find the whole GNU license buried in the menus of my old TiVo...)
So, you're telling me I can copypaste 100% some of the ai slop books on amazon and resell it as mine? Brb, gonna make a shit site an absolute diarrhea
If the AI generated code is recognisably close to the code the AI has been trained with, the copyright belongs to the creator of that code.
And they should obey the license of the code.
Since AIs are trained on copyleft code, either every output of AI code generators is copyleft, or none of it is legal to use at all.
I may be wrong but I think current legal understanding doesn't support this
Wikipedia – AI and copyright
I've found a similar formulation in a official German document before posting my above comment. Essentially, it doesn't matter if you've ~~"stolen"~~ copied somebody else's code yourself and used it in your work or did so by using an AI.
The US copyright office confirms this. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf
Did you even read your own report? It says that AI works are copyrightable in certain circumstances, not that they make a whole project public:
"AI-generated" works can be copyrighted. However, on the condition that the AI-generated elements are explicitly mentioned in the "Excluded Material" field. In other words, the parts generated by AI are not protected, only the parts that are expressed by human creativity. Courts in the U.S have already rejected registration for many AI works because of that.
P.S. I am completely opposed to (generative) AI as well as the copyright system. I'm just stating my findings researching the law and court cases.
Even if it were, it would be for you or I, but not for Microsoft, apple, Google, or Amazon.