[codekansas]

I don't think a model trained on a single company's data would be nearly as helpful as a model trained on all publicly licensed code on the internet. But suppose it were...

What if I'm not a massive corporation with millions of lines of code to train on and I want to pay for an AI coding assistant? Doesn't this make it effectively illegal for me to purchase such a product for a reasonable price when big companies will presumably be able to use it without paying the tax?

Another situation - let's say you're a company that contributes heavily to open source, but also accepts external contributions. Could Facebook train a model on the React codebase, for example, without having to pay the AI tax?

Another situation - suppose I start an LLM coding assistant and sell it to my friend. Presumably I don't have to pay the tax as a "low revenue" company. Then I get acquired or get some huge seed round and suddenly my customers have to pay the AI tax. Doesn't this just nuke all my customers?

Anyway, as a software engineer, I personally want people to use my code for whatever they want to use it for, without having to pay me for it. I indicate that by using an MIT license. Why throw that precedent out the window?

[barathr]

The policy would exempt all except big companies from the fees. So if you set up your own, you don't pay. And the effect of the revenue threshold creating an advantage for small businesses is commonplace in policy across the board -- SMBs don't have many of the same costs and obligations as larger companies.

And this would not prevent you from explicitly licensing your code or writing to let people to train on it. But what it would do is say that if someone didn't explicitly license it then it is covered under the policy.