In some jurisdictions (e.g. the UK) the law is already clear that you own the copyright. In the US it is almost certain that you will be the author. The reports of cases saying otherwise I have been misreported - the courts found the AI could not own the copyright.
Thaler v. Perlmutter: The D.C. Circuit Court affirmed in March 2025 that the Copyright Act requires works to be authored "in the first instance by a human being," a ruling the Supreme Court left intact by declining to hear the case in 2026.
Authors and inventors, courts have ruled, means people. Only people. A monkey taking a selfie with your camera doesn't mean you own a copyright. An AI generating code with your computer is likewise, devoid of any copyright protection.
The ruling says that the LLM cannot be the author. It does not say that the human being using the LLM cannot be the author. The ruling was very clear that it did not address whether a human being was the copyright holder because Thaler waived that argument.
the position with a monkey using your camera is similar, and you may or may not hold the copyright depending on what you did - was it pure accident or did you set things up. Opinions on the well known case are mixed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
Where wildlife photographers deliberately set up a shot to be triggered automatically (e.g. by a bird flying through the focus) they do hold the copyright.
AI generated code has no copyright. And if it DID somehow have copyright, it wouldn't be yours. It would belong to the code it was "trained" on. The code it algorithmically copied. You're trying to have your cake, and eat it too. You could maybe claim your prompts are copyrighted, but that's not what leaked. The AI generated code leaked.
The linked document labeled "Part 2: Copyrightability", section V. "Conclusions" states the following:
> the Copyright Office
concludes that existing legal doctrines are adequate and appropriate to resolve questions of
copyrightability. Copyright law has long adapted to new technology and can enable case-by-
case determinations as to whether AI-generated outputs reflect sufficient human contribution to
warrant copyright protection. As described above, in many circumstances these outputs will be
copyrightable in whole or in part—where AI is used as a tool, and where a human has been able
to determine the expressive elements they contain. Prompts alone, however, at this stage are
unlikely to satisfy those requirements.
So the TL;DR basically implies pure slop within the current guidelines outlined in conclusions is NOT copyrightable. However collaboration with an AI copyrightability is determined on a case by case basis. I will preface this all with the standard IANAL, I could be wrong etc, but with the concluding language using "unlikely" copyrightable for slop it sounds less cut and dry than you imply.
That's typical of this site. I hand you a huge volume of evidence explaining why AI generated work cannot be copyrighted. You search for one scrap of text that seems to support your position even when it does not.
You have no idea how bad this leak is for Anthropic because with the copyright office, you have a DUTY TO DISCLOSE any AI generated work, and it is fully RETROACTIVE. And what is part of this leak? undercover.ts. https://archive.is/S1bKY Where Claude is specifically instructed to HIDE DISCLOSURE of AI generated work.
That's grounds for the copyright office and courts to reject ANY copyright they MIGHT have had a right to. It is one of the WORST things they could have done with regard to copyright.
It's beyond obvious that a LLM cannot have copyright, any more than a cat or a rock can. The question is whether anyone has or if whatever content generated by a LLM simply does not constitute a work and is thus outside the entire copyright law. As far as I can see, it depends on the extent of the user's creative effort in controlling the LLM's output.
It may be obvious to you, but it has lead to at least one protracted court case in the US: Thaler v. Perlmutter.
> The question is whether anyone has or if whatever content generated by a LLM simply does not constitute a work and is thus outside the entire copyright law.
Its is going to vary with copyright law. In the UK the question of computer generated works is addressed by copyright law and the answer is "the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken"
Its also not a simple case of LLM generated vs human authored. How much work did the human do? What creative input was there? How detailed were the prompts?
In jurisdictions where there are doubts about the question, I think code is a tricky one. If the argument that prompts are just instructions to generate code, therefore the code is not covered by copyright, then you could also argue that code is instructions to a compiler to generate code and the resulting binary is not covered by copyright.
The binary should be considered "derived work". Only the original copyright owner has the exclusive right to create or authorize derivative works. Means you are not allowed to compile code unless you have the license to do so. Right?
Yes, so is LLM generated code a derivative work of the prompts? Does it matter how detailed the prompts are? How much the code conforms to what is already written (e.g. writing tests)?
It looks like it will be decided on a case by case basis.
It will also differ between countries, so if you are distributing software internationally what will be a constraint on treating the code as not copyrightable.
> is LLM generated code a derivative work of the prompts?
Very good question I would think it is. You are just using a mechanical system to transform your prompt to something else, Right?
But, a distiguishing factor may be that:
1. Output of the LLM for the same prompt can vary
2. So you don't really have "control" over what the
AI produces
3. Therefore you should not get a copyright to the output
of the LLM because you had very little to say about
how that transformation (from prompt to code) was made.
It is not "beyond obvious" that a cat cannot have copyright, given the lawsuit about a monkey holding copyright [1], and the way PETA tried to used that case as precedent to establish that any animal can hold copyright.
Anthropic could at least make a compelling case for the copyright.
It becomes legally challenging with regards to ownership if I ever use work equipment for a personal project. If it later takes off they could very well try to claim ownership in its entirety simply because I ran a test once (yes, there's a while silicon valley season for it).
I don't know if they'd win, but Anthropic absolutely would be able to claim the creation of that code was done on their hardware. Obviously we aren't employees of theirs, though we are customers that very likely never read what we agreed to in a signup flow.
Using work equipment for a personal project only matters because you signed a contract giving all of your IP to your employer for anything you did with (or sometimes without) your employer's equipment.
Anthropic's user agreement does not have a similar agreement.
My point was that they could make a compelling case though, not that they would win.
I don't know of ant precedent where the code was literally generated on someone else's system. Its an open question whether that implies any legal right to the work and I could pretty easily see a court accepting the case.
Who owns the copyright for something not written by anybody, you ask? Is it the man who pays to have it written, or the owner of the machine that does the writing? But it is neither. Nobody owns the copyright because nobody has written it.
In some jurisdictions (e.g. the UK) the law is already clear that you own the copyright. In the US it is almost certain that you will be the author. The reports of cases saying otherwise I have been misreported - the courts found the AI could not own the copyright.