It did come up in the discussion briefly. I think there are two big
aspects to this for GHC: Copyright or lack thereof and Licensing.
Lack of Copyright: GHC already uses a permissive license. Loss of
copyright on parts of the code base would allow those parts to be
used without carrying the BSD3 license forward. But in practice this has
little effect. The user would not be able to license it as it's not
under copyright at that point anyway. So use would remain permissive,
although no longer under BSD3 license.
To put this into other words. GHC is already not restricting use of the
source. And should LLM generated parts of GHC not be covered by copyright
this would not meaningfully change. This concern is primarily relevant
for projects that want to *restrict* specific use cases. As the GCC
project recently
did in order to safeguard the applicability of the (L)GPL license.
Licensing/Copyright being held by other parties: Contributions to GHC
are expected to be licensed under BSD3 or compatible license.
While agree that this is relevant, ultimately the responsibility of only
contributing source that is compatible with GHCs licensing falls on the
user,
independent of the tool used in question.
If there is a strong argument that companies could claim copyright over
code generated by their models it would indeed be right to reject those.
However as you alluded to all current providers are very explicit about
granting the user all legal rights and disclaiming the rights for
themselves.
For example here is the relevant blurp for claude:
/As between the parties and to the extent permitted by applicable law,
Anthropic agrees that Customer (a) retains all rights to its Inputs,
and (b) owns its Outputs. Anthropic disclaims any rights it receives to
the Customer Content under these Terms. Subject to Customer’s compliance
with these Terms, Anthropic hereby assigns to Customer its right, title
and interest (if any) in and to Outputs./
A scenario where those providers would be able to restrict distribution
of generated source in a GHC compatible way *after the fact* seems
impossible
to me given these terms of use.
There being one caveat. This only applies if users don't violate the
terms of use. So a user (re)generating swaths of code that get embedded
into GHC,
and then goes on to violate the terms of use could change this. Perhaps
that is something worth thinking about?
Overall I think the legal risks for GHC are constrained to my caveat
above, at least if we ignore laws being arbitrarily rewritten and
reinterpreted based on economic incentives.
There is little that can be done about the later in terms of policy to
protect ourselves so I don't think it should inform policy.
For the former perhaps the HF would be willing to sponsor a legal
consultation to clarify the possible impact of:
* Soundness of the waivers to rights over generated code by the common
providers.
* A contributor generating code and violating the LLM providers terms of
use as above.
* The consequences of a possible lack of legal copyright for part of the
source code.
* Generated code making use liable for copyright violations against
parties whos code was part of the training set.
I will reach out and see if we can make this happen.
Andreas
On 31/07/2026 10:09, damiancoding--- via ghc-devs wrote:
Dear all,
I have thus far been perusing the LLM policy discussion from the bleachers. A
lot of conversation has been had about the ethical and practical reasons to
support or abolish LLM use for GHC.
However, one really important point seems to have been all but omitted from the
conversation, and that is the legal aspect.
GHC, like any other project using any licensing at all, enjoys protections
based in the legal system of every country it is being used and developed in.
That is no small thing and is essentially what allows GHC to exist in the legal
sense. A body of work untethered from this is like a person without citizenship
- no one will advocate for it, and no government will back up legitimate claims
around it by enforcing laws and regulations.
It is the contention of some legal scholars that having a significant (not
large or overwhelming, merely significant) amount of AI based contributions in
a body of work can lead to lack of recognition of its copyright in court. This
opinion is already backed up by case law relating to
art:https://www.theverge.com/policy/887678/supreme-court-ai-art-copyright
Such a status would put the project's protections in danger legally and could
turn to foil the efforts of GHC contributors over the past numerous years.
Of course, art is not code, and I would say many people's code is not art...
but absence of proof is not proof of absence. This is merely legal limbo, not
legal certainty, and early indications suggest the tree may fall on the house.
In fact, who is to say that at least in some jurisdictions, AI companies
couldn't go rogue and turn around and say anything that's been generated does
not belong to you intellectually - it belongs to the model, and therefore to
its owner, the AI company? Of course, there are explainers and assurances, but
none of this is legally tested. As someone who has advised on, joined, and
started lawsuits in more than a handful different legal systems, I can tell you
that they are all very idiosyncratic and there is no common-sense to any of
them. Local law can be extremely surprising and in fact one place's laws can
contradict another place's laws.
There are also secondary effects as well. For example, can you get public
funding for such a project? Can you be recommended by government entities and
various organizations? Can you use or contribute to such work as a university
employee, researcher, or student? This last one is particularly important for a
project that lives and dies by the ability of researchers to contribute to it.
I may have simply missed it in the deluge, but I have found that there has been little to
no discussion of the effect of LLM contributions on the copyright of GHC. Perhaps before
entering this "Brave New World", we should see if the ice is too thin to walk
on.
Especially during war time, there has been a multitude of legal documents that
were proof of citizenship to one area or another. Sometimes they looked like
the blue British passport that is all the rage these days, sometimes they were
a tattered piece of paper in an envelope of you were lucky, with nothing more
to certify its authenticity than a stamp, and a block-letter name written by
someone who barely ever held a pen, at an outpost in the deep forest. This may
have been all that a person, coming from a country that may not even exist
anymore due to changes in war, has to go on for legal recognition as a citizen
of any country. Many times such documents were ad-hoc or provisional and there
wasn't even a way to check them for authenticity or correctness, if the
checking was being done by a person a thousand miles away from the document's
origin and who is not even able to read the alphabet let alone the language.
Very often such documents would not be recognized; it was as much dep
endent on the politics of the day (does the Soviet Union recognize the
Croatians?) as on whether you had a pack of cigarettes to share with the
militia man patrolling the path you were on. A solid passport from a powerful
country got you out of trouble.
The legal system around LLM contributions is changing. Very little of it is
proven and what has been proven so far shows that they enjoy no protection. For
better or worse whatever imaginary lines on the ground we imagine and agree
upon within our little tribe will be completely disregarded and obliterated by
the machine of war that sets out the order as the legal system solidifies. To
understand how this can lead to disappointment, just ask people in Finland
whether they are nostalgic for their lost territory.
I believe the integration of LLM based output into GHC is an issue that requires prudence far beyond
"community consensus", "robust conversations", and "good proposals". It can
clearly have ramifications of legal, compliance, civic, policy, and otherwise government-related nature,
should be treated seriously as such, and therefore the project should source informed analysis and
recommendation from those whose job it is to do so. This in particular means we should be hiring and
listening to impartial professionals and not sounding off as developers who don't know the first thing about
such matters.
I say all this as someone who uses AI on the daily and has worked at a frontier
AI lab that has been acquired by interests related to the US government. I
think GHC is more important than being able to work on it with specific
techniques. Everyone employing asbestos had the best intentions and could never
have known where it would lead, but out of this period in history we have
learned to be careful about employing new technology. Currently, the only
people talking about this on this list are asbestos users and carpenters, and
no one's thought to ask the doctors or physicists.
With best regards,
Damian
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