> even if no one company or person owns it.

Maybe, but I don't think there's any legal president for that, is there? Much of existing law is based on centuries of private property rights. I don't see any government undoing that... or at least, not quickly.

The IP laws are a) not really modelled after material property rights; b) are quite much more recent than "centuries"; c) there is legal precedent for that, see e.g. the airplane-related patents being pooled in 1917 by the demand from the US government.

> Maybe, but I don't think there's any legal president for that, is there?

  We're not locked in to a suicide pact with what the Founding Fathers decided back in the late 1700s. Congress can decide that all LLM-generated code is automatically covered by -say- the GPLv3, even if no one holds the copyright to it.