> The concern discussed here is copyrighted material being generated unintentionally and the original author asserting their rights.

both intentional (malicious contributor) or unintentional (Large-Laundering-Model) are copyright issues -- which is the point of GCC's policy.

> I can also intentionally copy paste the copyrighted material into my merge request without the use of AI in an attempt to get the maintainer into trouble.

You can. You can also do it significantly faster with significantly less effort while being harder to detect using agents etc.

I do not think some untested theory about sabotaging open-source projects by intentionally inserting copyrighted material using AI, causing legal issues for maintainers, is worthwhile to discuss here.

That is obviously not what anyone was referring to, nor does it make sense, when there is a much more reasonable basis to prohibit the same contribution.

Namely inserting vulnerabilities. This one actually happened before afaik, and provides a clear benefit to the attacker.