Open source and AI-assisted development: navigating the legal issues

Open source and AI-assisted development: navigating the legal issues Attribution and marking Copyright and licensing formalities Are AI tools “plagiarism machines”? AI-assisted contributions and the DCO Establishing trust Looking ahead The adaptable enterprise: Why AI readiness is disruption readiness About the authors Chris Wright Richard Fontana More like this Blog post Blog post Original podcast Original podcast Browse by channel Automation Artificial intelligence Open hybrid cloud Security Edge computing Infrastructure Applications Virtualization Share In our previous post in this series, we talked about how AI is beginning to change the way software is developed. In this follow-up, we focus on some of the main legal (or quasi-legal) issues that open source developers themselves have been raising regarding AI-assisted development. This isn’t a comprehensive overview of every legal issue connected to AI. We aren’t addressing, for example, customer concerns about compliance with AI regulations or liability issues relating to contracts for AI-powered products. Instead, we’re focusing on issues that are being actively debated inside open source communities. Our views on these issues reflect our commitment to responsible use of AI technologies and our “default to open” philosophy. We believe that collaborative and transparent approaches are the best ways to address these concerns constructively. Attribution is a core legal and cultural norm in open source. Licenses generally require you to preserve copyright and authorship notices, and to avoid misleading claims of authorship. AI-assisted development complicates this. Because AI systems are not considered “authors” under copyright law, there is technically no one to credit. But it would still be misleading for a developer to present substantial AI-generated output as purely their own work.