Sigrid Jin was waiting to board a plane when he saw stunning news that artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic had accidentally leaked the source code for Claude Code, its popular A.I. agent. Mr. Jin, 25, an undergraduate student, scrambled to post a copy online. His worried girlfriend quickly texted him: Was he violating copyright law?<\/p>\n
Mr. Jin turned to a team of A.I. assistants for a solution. He directed them to rewrite the leaked code in another programming language, then shared that version online. Within hours, more than 100,000 people had liked or linked to it.<\/p>\n
Anthropic<\/a>, one of the leading A.I. companies alongside OpenAI, has said the leak had been caused by human error and, citing copyright violations, demanded that GitHub, an online library of computer code, remove posts sharing the code. Thousands of posts were taken down. But Mr. Jin\u2019s version remains online. He said Anthropic had not asked him to take it down.<\/p>\n It is unclear whether Anthropic, which did not respond to questions from The New York Times, is drawing a distinction with the rewritten code. Mr. Jin said he believed rewriting the code transformed it into a new work, one that Anthropic could not claim ownership over.<\/p>\n He said he was driven less by money or fame than by a desire to make a broader philosophical point. What is the value of copyrighted intellectual property in an era when A.I. can easily replicate not just computer code but art, music and literature in minutes?<\/p>\n \u201cI just wanted to raise some ethical questions in the A.I. agent era,\u201d he said. \u201cAny creative work can be reproduced in a second.\u201d<\/p>\n Computer code has long been treated as a protected creative work, akin to music or art. But enforcing copyright has been difficult, because a software\u2019s underlying computational instructions can be copied or tweaked in ways that are hard to trace. Even what counts as protected has been up for debate. Google and Oracle<\/a> waged a legal battle for years, arguing over where to draw the line between creative expression and the basic functions of software.<\/p>\n Now, a new technology is making that even more complicated.<\/p>\n When the Anthropic leak surfaced online, Mr. Jin and his friends already treated A.I. assistant tools like Claude Code and OpenClaw<\/a> as employees to handle daily tasks. These agents don\u2019t just answer questions; they carry out tasks on their own<\/a> once prompted with a goal, such as \u201corganize my receipts\u201d or \u201cmake a new social media post.\u201d<\/p>\n The agents also make copying and imitation easier than ever and on a far greater scale.<\/p>\n For many software companies, as well as authors, artists and musicians, the risk is not just direct copying. It\u2019s that the market for their work could be flooded with A.I.-generated substitutes that cost almost nothing to produce, diminishing the value of the original work.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat happened with the Claude Code leak is essentially a preview of what\u2019s coming for every creative industry,\u201d said Russ Pearlman, a lawyer specializing in A.I. and technology and chief information officer of Dallas College. Existing copyright rules, he said, were built on the assumption that copying takes time and that there\u2019s a meaningful window to take action to protect a work.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen an A.I. agent can rewrite 512,000 lines of code into a different language before most people have finished their morning coffee, that assumption collapses,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In 2022, the United States Copyright Office<\/a> said works created entirely by A.I. without human creative input are not eligible for copyright protection. A follow-up review reaffirmed that decision, finding that a simple human prompt was not enough. But courts have yet to decide how much human involvement is required.<\/p>\n \u201cArtists and musicians are extremely concerned about this,\u201d said Yelena Ambartsumian, the founder of Ambart Law, a firm in New York that counsels start-ups about A.I., intellectual property and other matters. \u201cAll of the resources you put into being able to protect your copyrightable human expression, does it really matter if in a second or two hours that expression can be copied and then changed?\u201d<\/p>\n Many popular A.I. models were trained to produce humanlike prose by ingesting vast swaths of material posted online. Artists, authors and media companies have said A.I. firms have infringed their copyrights by using their work to train their systems.<\/p>\n