So Anthropic employees are using Claude Code to contribute AI-generated code to open source repositories and hiding the fact using their own internal “undercover mode”.

Totally trustworthy people.

(Any open source project that at the very least requires disclosure of AI-authored contributions should immediately ban Anthropic employees on principle.)

#AI #Anthropic #ClaudeCode #subterfuge

@aral Honestly I don't actually hate this.

It's a tool. The _user_ is responsible for what they're submitting. It's putting code generated by them in their name. I think this is actually good.

@aredridel @aral I really can’t agree with this, because it’s a question of accurate labeling not of “responsibility” or “authorship”. co-authored-by is perhaps the wrong method for labeling such things, but consider raw milk. ultimately, it is indeed the producer’s responsibility to ensure their product is free of contamination. but disclosure of its method of production is explicitly the kind of requirement that allows consumers of said product to make safe choices

@glyph Yeah, I disagree. Code isn't ingredients and it's not “contamination" any more than you should label “I used search and replace on this”

What you want to know is whether it was well engineered or not.

And in fact, this is almost entirely orthogonal to "safety”. This is an engineering product. The safety comes from processes and whether or not _anyone checked the work done was right_, not the inputs.

@aredridel @glyph It is ingredients. It's not search-and-replace. It's literally incorporating parts of an unknown set of almost-surely-copyrighted works, without license or attribution, into the submission the person is misrepresenting as their own.

@aredridel @glyph What "AI coding tools" *should* be putting in commit messages is:

Co-Authored-By: An unknown and unknowable set of people who did not consent to their work being used this way and to which there is no license for inclusion.

@dalias Morally arguable but not actually true under the copyright regime that exists.

At what point does learning from others constitute their authorship?

@aredridel LLM slop is nothing like "learning from others".

But if you recall, we even took precautions against that. FOSS projects reimplementing proprietary things were careful to exclude anyone who might had read the proprietary source, disassembled proprietary code, worked at the companies who wrote or had access to that code, etc.

@dalias Yes. Do you know why?
@aredridel So that it would be abundantly clear, in any plausibly relevant jurisdiction, that the work was not derivative and not infringing.
@dalias Right. It's a massive hedge on a specific facet of copyright law.