this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2026
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Why? Reverse engineering is neither unethical or illegal.
I never said it was. But, I'm also not an investor. I'm just saying the kind of things that scare off investors. And this would be a big one.
What? The literal extermination of the human race is not enough to scare off investors.
Have you seen the investment in fossil fuels. 😄
🤣😂🥲🙂😐😔🥺😭
Killing the entire species is absolutely less of a concern for investors than copyright violations.
At this point, I think they believe it’s a good indicator of potential. A way of saying just how awesome and magical and powerful the AI is.
Otherwise the "AI went off the rails and breached X companies servers" would also have been met with contempt and negatively impacted them.
I still can't wrap my head around how this strategy ("buy our models, they are so powerful they might kill all humans") would work in their favor, apart from one thing: restrictions would hurt Chinese models probably more than themselves. But I find it very unlikely that characters like Altman or Amodei would be capable of playing that kind of 4d chess. It's a weird flex
No, but if you were an investor, would you invest in a product that would make it so people can easiy recreate your other products so that they stop buying your other products? Ending humanity doesn't scare them but making $0.75 less this year does
Well, to be blunt, it depends. Would the eventual extermination of the human race cause them to lose money in the short term?
It's dangerous for IP, though.
Only if it is protected.Which code is afaik not.
In the US code is copyrighted the same as literary works. But that only covers the actual lines of code and not the ideas, functions or algorithms they implement. This means that if someone copy pastes your code word for word they are infringing your copyright but if they write their own code that does the same function as yours they are fine.
It absolutely is.
Human-generated code absolutely is, correct. But AI-generated code is still untested. AI-generated art does not have copyright protection currently. My money is that AI-generated code will have copyright protection through some mental and legal gymnastics. Because money.
Copyright generally requires human expression regardless of what the type of work is, it's not about what you were inspired by
If you did derive your work from something else and yours is similar enough, then now both you and the original author has separate copyrights on the result which both needs to be licensed to sell the work (prime example is book translations)
Oh, AI-generated code may not be, but like you said we don't have a court ruling yet.
I don't think it can't be, but we'd first have to have models trained without violating the rights of all the authors of the works in the training data. Like if you trained a model only on GPL software, then the model and its output should also be GPL.
I'm not so convinced on that one. Copying code without permission, yes, that's illegal. Distributing copied code without permission, also illegal. But processing code (copied with permission) into weights, that doesn't feel to me like a violation. If I have a legit copy of something, I should be able to distribute computed statistics about that copy.
EFF points out some hazards: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/rewriting-copyright-law-generative-ai-would-hurt-everyone
Sure, but it's not just statistics like "30% of lines contain the letter E". It reproduces the material, sometimes verbatim.
A model is very obviously a derivative work, as it has 0% original content input. Under fair use law, it also very obviously fails all four tests.
Reproduction of the material we agree is against the law.