What with AI assisted code generation?
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-code-meta-microsoft-google-llamacon-engineers-2025-4
AI now writes a big chunk of code at Microsoft and Google — and it could be coming for even more at Meta
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI writes up to 30% of code for some of its projects.
It comes days after Google CEO Sundar Pichai said AI writes over 30% of new code at the company.
Mark Zuckerberg predicts AI could handle half of Meta's developer work within a year.
That poses a large problem for these companies:
- If AI is involved in creation of code, and AI output is not copyrightable,
- and if prompts are also not sufficient input to make AI output copyrightable,
- and if–as is established law–specifications are not copyrightable works, only their implementation is,
then these companies will run into problems with producing copyrightable works.
On top of that: If a problem is so "simple" that an AI can generate code to solve it, is the work of a human that codes a solution to that problem manually still meeting the minimum bar for a copyrightable work? And if that is copyrightable, what makes it so?
Is your organization using AI to generate code that you assume is copyrightable and can be licensed to customers? If so, how do you ensure that the code actually IS copyrightable? How do you prove that?