This may be a hot take, but I strongly believe that all code generated by AI should be Open Source. And here's why.
First of all, AI models were trained on a massive corpus of Open Source code written since RMS announced the GNU Project and the Free Software Movement. That code was simply scraped from the internet and used without permission or proper attribution. The models were also trained on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange sister projects, which are released under Creative Commons licenses that legally require attribution. Turning this collective knowledge into proprietary, closed-source code feels like license laundering.
The second reason is legal: purely AI-generated code is not written by a human, meaning it should not be copyrightable. The foundation for this principle in the US goes back to the famous Monkey Selfie dispute, which established that non-humans cannot hold copyrights. A precedent later cited by the U.S. Copyright Office regarding AI. Following the same logic, Wikimedia Commons requires all purely AI-generated images to be tagged as Public Domain.
