Citation needed.
Whether AI output can fall under copyright at all is still up for debate - with some early rulings indicating that the fact that you prompted the AI does not automatically grant you authorship.
Even if it does, it hasn't been settled yet what the impact of your AI having been trained on copyrighted material is on its output. You can make a not-completely-unreasonable argument that AI inference output is a derivative work of AI training input.
Fact is, the matter isn't settled yet, which means any open-source project should assume the worst possible outcome - which in practice means a massive AI-generated PR like this should be treated like a nuke which could go off at any moment.
Why write open-source software at all, when the government could outlaw open-source entirely? What if an asteroid destroys Earth and there are no humans left to enjoy your work? At some point, you have to agree that a risk isn't worth worrying about. And your "worst possible outcome" is just the arbitrary outcome that you think has some subjective risk threshold. And it's certainly not one I agree with. Furthermore, calling it a "nuke" is a bad analogy because that implies that it can't be put back in the bottle once opened. In reality, we're dealing with legal definitions, which can be redefined as easily as defined.
The two main points are that:
1. Copyright cannot be assigned to an AI agent.
2. Copyrighted works require human creativity to be applied in order to be copyrighted.
For point 2 this would apply to times were AI one shots a generic prompt. But for these large PRs where multiple prompts are used and a human has decided what the design should be and how the API should look you get the human creativity required for copyright.
In regards to being a derivative work I think it would be hard to argue that an LLM is copying or modifying an existing original work. Even if it came up with an exact duplicate of a piece of code it would be hard to prove that it was a copy and not an independent recreation from scratch.
>the worst possible outcome
The worst possible outcome is they get sued and Anthropic defends them from the copyright infringement claim due to Anthopic's indemnity clause when using Claude Code.
That indemnity clause is only for Team, Enterprise and API users. Do you know what was used here?
Also the commercial version is limited to “…Customer and its personnel, successors, and assigns…”. I am very much not a lawyer and couldn’t find definitions of these in the agreement but I am not sure how transferable this indemnity would be to an open source project.
I reviewed it and it looks like personal Claude Code subscriptions are not covered, so it's riskier than I claimed.