[thelastbender12]

This is a good thought exercise. I wouldn't call it stealing, though I am not sure how legal liability is assessed, say if they picked up GPL code unknown to the company, and the company is later sued over it.

This isn't derived from principled reasoning, but I think of it as similar to community norms. Not the best example, but you wouldn't mind someone subletting their homes to Airbnb, but if all of your apartment complex does it, it invites regulation. A product like copilot enables copying code (even if inspired, and not verbatim) at a scale that individual developers can't. So respecting software licenses needs to be codified (legally?) while previously it was left unmonitored.