[miki123211]

A sufficiently capable LLM might be good enough to do cleanroom design on its own, with little to no human assistance. That would destroy the entire idea of copyright as it exists for software.

You need one agent that can write a complete specification of any piece of software, either just by using it and inferring how it works, or by reverse engineering if not prohibited by the license. You then have a lawyer in the middle (human or LLM) review it, removing any bits that are copyrighted. You then need another agent that can re-implement that spec. You just made a perfectly legal clone.

Cleanroom design is a well-established precedent in the US, and has been used before, just with teams of humans instead of LLMs.

I think some companies will be completely unaffected by this, as either the behavior of their code can't easily be infered just from API calls, or because their value actually lies in users / data / business relationships, not the code directly. Stripe would be my go-to example, you can't just reverse-engineer all their optimizations and antifraud models just by getting a developer API key and calling their API endpoints. They also have a lot of relationships with banks and other institutions, which are arguably just as important to their business as their code. Instagram, Uber or Amazon also fall into this bucket somewhat.

[dcow]

Humans can also do that, they’re just slower and presumably more expensive.

[eek2121]

Except that LLMs themselves are close to being killed off for the lack of clean room implementations themselves, at least here in the U.S.

[palata]

One can hope, but I don't think it will happen.

[bloomburger]

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