Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

IMO this is the greatest argument against AI as technofascism. The general public seems to believe that AI will usher in technofascism by claiming corporate ownership of AI output: the independent entrepreneur will be unable to compete against the corporations compute, every piece of data about you will be stolen and monetized by AI, and you will own nothing.

But AI might in fact do the exact opposite and reverse the privatization trend that the West has been going through for the last 400 years. All of our copyright laws rely on the idea that there is a human consciousness behind the copyright. The more AI has input, the less we can claim ownership. If AI returns everything to the commons, then it results in a much more egalitarian world.

Hilariously, many people, especially artists, see the return of the commons as an assault against them. They’re so captured by copyright that they assume any infringement on their copyright is inherently fascist. It’s ridiculous. Copyright is a corporations number 1 weapon when it comes to creating a moat and keeping the masses out.

The original intent of copyright, in fact, was an incentive to return an idea to the commons. Experts used to hide their discoveries in order to keep them for themselves. Copyright provided an opportunity to release this knowledge and still profit. There were even several cases where it was established that those who claimed copyright could retain copyright even if the idea had been previously discovered. This created a huge incentive: release the knowledge or risk having your process copyrighted by the opposition. But that system worked because copyright could only exist for so long (14 years, doubled if they filed again.)

Now copyright is a lifelong sentence at almost 100 years. The entire purpose of it has been undermined. Corporations own all your childhood and by the time you can profit off of it, it’s outdated.

A world where the mainstream is primarily a commons seems to me like an egalitarian world. I’d like to live in that world.

My opinion, copyright has mattered very little in the corporate world. Copyright is effectively meaningless with SaaS, and the compiled software ran on your machine is protected more by technical controls and EULAs. A world where copyright didn't exist for software would look nearly the same for the commercial world. Trade secrets, NDAs, and employment contracts bind workers more than copyright. The only thing that the question of copyright has real world impact is open source, but even then only for more restrictive licenses such as gpl.

No.

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

So what is held as true is only the implication stated above and not the truth value of the claims that either kind of licenses are valid.

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

The open source licenses are intended as defenses against the people who would otherwise attempt to claim ownership of that code and apply a proprietary license to the code, i.e. exactly what now Anthropic and the like have done, together with their corporate customers.

Of course, if it is accepted that the code generated by an AI coding assistant is not copyrightable, then using it would not really be a violation of the original open source licenses. The problem is that even if this principle is the one accepted legally, at least for now, both Anthropic and their corporate customers appear to assume that they own the copyright for this code that should have been either non-copyrightable or governed by the original licenses of the code used for training.

Well, eventually it'll probably be added to the Berne Convention agreement or some such.

I have trouble believing that the DMCA claims would be found to be in bad faith when they were made at a time when the question of what degree of human input is required to acquire copyright on AI generate code hasn't been resolved at all.

It doesn't seem like bad faith to think that copyright is stronger than the courts end up thinking, just being mistaken.