By that logic, anybody who's learned operating systems development via the book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation (Tanenbaum and Woodhull) would be legally unable to write an operating system, ever. That book had Minix source code, which at the time was, nevermind copyleft, proprietary.

AIUI this includes Linus Torvalds, and would have affected Linux. Which, by the way, is heavily written by LLM these days, including by Linus himself using Anthropic's tools.

An LLM reading some code and learning from it (at any point in time, in training or as used through agentic programming tools) is in this regard no different from an human being doing the same thing.

Nothing stops me from reading Asahi's source code and then writing my own from what I learned. My agent can do the same thing faster and better. It would also be less likely to resemble Asahi's, as an LLM has seen and learned from a far larger body of code than I have in my entire 30+ years of programming.

If anything, code is becoming no longer a product but a commodity, which brings us closer to the sort of freedom GNU and the FSF aimed for; Something to celebrate.

No, there's no way the genie is going back into the bottle. The past is not coming back. Reality is best accepted and worked with, not fought.

Much of this is far from settled law. All it takes is one law declaring code produced by LLMs to be a derivative work of training data for the entire house of cards to collapse.

Not saying this is likely, but it's possible, and the combined market power of many industries dwarfs the market power of the fledgeling LLM industry, so it's not necessarily unlikely, either.

In other words, it's a significant risk.