my take is that either it IS copyrightable and thus every single fucking piece of LLM-written code is a copyright violation of biblical proportions (because it’s trained on everything), or it isn’t copyrightable and thus effectively unusable for open source things
I do a lot of “vibe coding” but just put my stuff out with MIT or GPL depending, its mostly just stuff for me and I have no intention of trying to monetize the code itself.
Though I’m a weirdo and don’t have a profit motive aside from living a moderate life and making useful things for myself.
I feel like in general too many things are created for the sole reason of trying to generate profit and it bastardizes everything, though I get it, look at the world we live in.
Edit: Also been trying to move away from Copilot/ChatGPT and have expanded my homelab enough to be able to get really competent use out of open source models.
Qwen3.8 27b is pretty damn good when I was used to using Copliot Raptor (god that model was rough but still least free…) or constantly running out of quota on ChatGPT
I also have always been the techy nerd people went to for help, so I have a lot of troubleshooting and general “how programs work” knowledge that helps me steer design, took some OOC classes and such over the years just could never get over the hump to actually write myself so LLMs have been so transformative to me.
The absolute irony of wanting to copyright code using copyright-infringing LLMs.
The short answer: Legally, maybe. Ethically, no.
It’s absolutely ethical to ignore copyrights.
I don’t know, Unlicense is still an OSS license, and imo that’s what vibe code should mostly be.
Ethically, no.
Sam Altman: Hold my beer.
I had a friend of mine ask me today how he could protect his personal website which he completely let AI build, including all the text, from being copied by others. I rolled my eyes so hard I can still feel it. Told him not to worry about it.
It is not copyrightable. This is already settled law.
It’s a little more complicated than how you’re making it out to be and it’s also going to depend on where you live.
TL/DR: It can be copyrightable as a whole, but the output of a single prompt is not likely copyrightable.
The U.S. Copyright Office put together a report in 2025 on how AI is being handled in the U.S. as well as in other parts of the world.
See Section II - F: “Modifying or Arranging AI-Generated Content”
Generating content with AI is often an initial or intermediate step, and human authorship may be added in the final product. As explained in the AI Registration Guidance, “a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that ‘the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.’”¹²⁶ A human may also “modify material originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection.”¹²⁷
As several commenters noted, human authors should be able to claim copyright if they select, coordinate, and arrange AI-generated material in a creative way.¹²⁸ This would provide protection for the output as a whole (although not the AI-generated material alone).¹²⁹ A relatively common scenario in registration applications is the combination of human-authored text with AI-generated images. In one early case, for instance, the Office found that the selection and arrangement of AI-generated images with human-authored text in a comic book were protectable as a compilation.
Then if you skip to the conclusion of the report:
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.
If you’re curious where your country falls on the spectrum, see Section III - International Approaches.
Edit: added TL/DR.
Trust Me vs. Bro (2026)
Only works created by humans can be copyrighted. This was borne out when it was determined that a photo a … monkey? Ape? One of those, took of itself by accident could not have copyright because a person wasn’t involved in the creation of the image.
So far, the same has been ruled for works created by GenAI. See all the artworks out there that people were mad about not being able to get copyrighted.
edit: Also see this article. https://www.wordsbywes.ink/articles/tools/llm-generated-text-still-cant-be-copyrighted/
work wholly generated by AI
Wholly
The push for protection of works created by AI has been spearheaded by Thaler, chief executive of neural network firm Imagination Engines. In 2018, he listed an AI system, the Creativity Machine, as the sole creator of an artwork called A Recent Entrance to Paradise
Further down:
So, it seems likely to me that this is where we will wind up: work wholly written by an LLM (the spirits or macaque in the above cases) will not be eligible for copyright; instead, the applicant will have to show sufficient creativity in the prompts (the questions in the Urantia case) and in editing and compiling the output.
It’s like you googled it and copy pasted the link without reading it.
You can copyright something the moment you modify it or use it in something else. The law is more about how AI can’t hold onto copyrights. It’s to protect us from OpenAI saying they own everything you generate with their model. It stop copyright mills from running gens 24/7 and copyrighting every possible way to write a simple function.
It is a bit more complicated than that, and the legal motivation from the Copyright Office is different than what you describe.
One of the most informative cases, in my opinion, is the Copyright Office’s back and forth on Zarya of the Dawn. In their view, even thousands of refining prompts cannot be sufficient to convey copyright protection on an AI generated image since it lacks the necessary control and connection to the person. Suryast is another helpful case. I think they’re still very incomplete when you start to consider works like those from Jackson Pollock or, my personal favorite hypo, an artist with a prosthetic that uses statistical machine learning to control the end effector and thus the paintbrush. But those are just hypotheticals for now.
I help chair a conference of IP attorneys and others who specialize in software licensing and AI so we’ve been talking about this for a while now. We actually just had the conference this week so I can probably share some resources or presentations if people really want to get nerdy about it.
I’d actually love some documentation because it is indeed very complicated.
I’m also curious about your opinion on which way they will swing, since I see the courts kind of sticking to the middle more than anything.
The Zarya case seems pretty clear. From an article though:
The agency wrote that, unlike a photographer, users of Midjourney do not have the same degree of control over the final images. Photographers can control many parts of their photographs — the framing, the lighting, the subject, the presentation of the subject, the exposure time, the depth of field, etc — even though the camera ultimately captures the image.
By and large, Sota models do give that kind of control nowadays, so I don’t know if that would change things.
I feel like it’s going to end up as a case by case basis, where it depends on the feeling of effort put into it more than anything else.
I suppose the general understanding thus far is similar to how much copyright a boss is entitled to the intellectual work of his underlings? I mean, that hypothetical artist is actually controlling the tool, vibe coders aren’t controlling anything.
If it’s vibe coded, the person who wrote the prompt had minimal impact on the output. They can’t, because they don’t understand how it works. Their contribution is primarily limited to 1. writing a spec, which is often laughably vague, 2. testing the output to see if it works, and 3. if it doesn’t work right, telling the AI to fix the problems.
This was also in response to the ‘trust me bro’ snide comment. I’m not going to go into detail for something that is practically sealioning.
What you say applies to slop, not anyone using AI seriously. Which is a small minority, but still.
If you put in a lot of work, you might not be the author of the realization but you are author of the concept (assuming it is not trivial). Why should you not be able to protect your ideas?
What is the status of a movie director compared to the actors?
Who is usually mentioned when discussing whether the movie was well crafted or not?
The best actor cannot save a shitty plot.
You’re thinking of patents, not copyright. You can’t copyright an idea, only the implementation of an idea. I could spend years perfecting a play, but when a troupe performs that play, I don’t own their performance.
And you underestimate the idiocy of self-proclaimed ‘vibe coders’. Go into practically any FOSS community and see what they have to say about vibe-coded pull requests. The people making them have no clue what the code is doing, they’re just chasing clout with minimal effort.
That’s really going to depend on how strictly you define “vibe coded”. If that means that someone put in a single prompt and the LLM spit out an entire program, then yes, I doubt that would be copyrightable.
However, if the person “vibe coding” does understand how to program, and they use multiple prompts and organize the code to make a working product, then the code could be copyrightable by compilation:
That’s a real big ‘if’. Someone who understands and shapes the code isn’t really vibe coding. I might still not agree with what they’re doing, but it’s not vibe coding if they can take responsibility for every line of code produced.
This article is from the Free Software Foundation Europe. It does mention US law and how they and other countries require a natural person to create the work, but also that e.g. Ireland and the UK do not.
It also doesn’t really define ‘vibe code’ the way that it is generally understood by developers. Lots of devs use LLMs to do the busywork parts of development without actually vibe coding. It’s when you don’t understand what your code does that it becomes ‘vibe code’ - i.e. you’re relying on the vibes rather than understanding the code itself to determine if it’s good enough. Under that definition, where the prompt typically isn’t detailed enough to be considered a significant creative work and the person doing the prompting not only does not - but cannot - understand what it is doing, vibe code is NOT copyrightable, full stop.
If it gets included in a larger work that doesn’t fit that definition, then sure, the whole is copyrightable, but then it’s just chunks of vibe code, not a vibe coded product - and the contribution in the form of a pull request is not. It is public domain.
deleted by creator
RTFA