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There are also new jobs emerging to safeguard a companies assets that were created by AI. New white hat hacking opportunities. Anyways, however you put this, I

There are also new jobs emerging to safeguard a companies assets that were created by AI. New white hat hacking opportunities. Anyways, however you put this, I see this as a property theft and taking pride at open sourcing does not justify it.

ralferoo 6mo ago
It's also disingenuous to call it open source as that might tempt others to use it believing that it actually is open source. Let's call it what it is - stolen IP and released without permission of the author. Sure, it's good that it opens the debate as to whether that's ethical given that's essentially what the model itself is doing, but it's very clear in this instance that he's just asked for and been given a copy of source that has a clear ownership. That's about as clear cut as obtaining e.g. commercial server-side code and distributing it in contravention of the licence.
- redfloatplane 6mo ago
  It's not completely clear that this is the original source. According to the post it's a reimplementation based on documentation created from the original source, or perhaps from developer documentation and the SDK. Whether that's the same thing from a legal standpoint, I don't really know - I think from a personal morality standpoint it's clear that they are the same thing.
  - vrganj 6mo ago
    It feels more like clean room reverse engineering by llm, technically.
- cycomanic 6mo ago
  Well first they need to proof that Viktor was actually copyrightable. If it was largely written by an llm, that might not be the case? AFAIK several rulings have stated that AI generated code can not be copyrighted.
  - metalcrow 6mo ago
    This is a common misreading of the law. AI cannot hold authorship of code, but no ruling has claimed so far that ai output itself can't be copyrighted (that I know of)
    - ralferoo 6mo ago
      This would suggest that there has been and that there seem little will to revisit it: https://www.theverge.com/policy/887678/supreme-court-ai-art-copyright https://www.theverge.com/policy/887678/supreme-court-ai-art-... That said, the article says "Okay, prompts, great. Are they any interesting? Surprisingly... yes. As an example workflow_discovery contains a full 6-phase recipe for mining business processes out of Slack conversations, something that definitely required time and experiments to tune. It's hardcoded business logic, but in prompt instead of code." So the article author clearly knows this prompt would be copyrighted as it wasn't output from an AI, and recognises that there would have been substantial work involved in creating it.
      - metalcrow 6mo ago
        That Reuters article is misleadingly worded. The Stephen Thaler case in question is because Thaler tried to register the AI itself as the author of the copyright, not that he tried to register the output for copyright under his own name. https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2026/03/the-final-word-supreme-court-refuses-to-hear-case-on-ai-authorship https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2026/03/the-f...
      - fc417fc802 6mo ago
        Suppose I illicitly get my hands on the source code for a proprietary product. I read through this code I'm not supposed to have. I write up a detailed set of specifications based on it. I hand those specifications off to someone else to do a clean room implementation. Sure, I didn't have a license for the code that I read. But I'm pretty sure that doesn't taint my coworker's clean room implementation.
        6mo ago

ralferoo 6mo ago

It's also disingenuous to call it open source as that might tempt others to use it believing that it actually is open source. Let's call it what it is - stolen IP and released without permission of the author. Sure, it's good that it opens the debate as to whether that's ethical given that's essentially what the model itself is doing, but it's very clear in this instance that he's just asked for and been given a copy of source that has a clear ownership. That's about as clear cut as obtaining e.g. commercial server-side code and distributing it in contravention of the licence.

redfloatplane 6mo ago
It's not completely clear that this is the original source. According to the post it's a reimplementation based on documentation created from the original source, or perhaps from developer documentation and the SDK. Whether that's the same thing from a legal standpoint, I don't really know - I think from a personal morality standpoint it's clear that they are the same thing.
- vrganj 6mo ago
  It feels more like clean room reverse engineering by llm, technically.
cycomanic 6mo ago
Well first they need to proof that Viktor was actually copyrightable. If it was largely written by an llm, that might not be the case? AFAIK several rulings have stated that AI generated code can not be copyrighted.
- metalcrow 6mo ago
  This is a common misreading of the law. AI cannot hold authorship of code, but no ruling has claimed so far that ai output itself can't be copyrighted (that I know of)
  - ralferoo 6mo ago
    This would suggest that there has been and that there seem little will to revisit it: https://www.theverge.com/policy/887678/supreme-court-ai-art-copyright https://www.theverge.com/policy/887678/supreme-court-ai-art-... That said, the article says "Okay, prompts, great. Are they any interesting? Surprisingly... yes. As an example workflow_discovery contains a full 6-phase recipe for mining business processes out of Slack conversations, something that definitely required time and experiments to tune. It's hardcoded business logic, but in prompt instead of code." So the article author clearly knows this prompt would be copyrighted as it wasn't output from an AI, and recognises that there would have been substantial work involved in creating it.
    - metalcrow 6mo ago
      That Reuters article is misleadingly worded. The Stephen Thaler case in question is because Thaler tried to register the AI itself as the author of the copyright, not that he tried to register the output for copyright under his own name. https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2026/03/the-final-word-supreme-court-refuses-to-hear-case-on-ai-authorship https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2026/03/the-f...
    - fc417fc802 6mo ago
      Suppose I illicitly get my hands on the source code for a proprietary product. I read through this code I'm not supposed to have. I write up a detailed set of specifications based on it. I hand those specifications off to someone else to do a clean room implementation. Sure, I didn't have a license for the code that I read. But I'm pretty sure that doesn't taint my coworker's clean room implementation.
      - 6mo ago