The legal effect of AI generated code on software licenses is untested in court and AFAIK has no explicit laws. So really no one knows how it will work yet.
The US Copyright Office has updated its guidelines:
If AI content is present, the Office will only register the work if the human contributions are sufficiently creative and if the AI-generated portions are supplementary or used as a tool under human direction. Essentially, they ask: “Is the work basically one of human authorship, with the computer merely assisting?” If yes, it can be protected (with a disclaimer that some content isn’t human-made). If no, if the AI’s role overshadows the human’s, then the work, or at least the AI-created portion, is not eligible for copyright.
In Canada, where I live:
So, can you claim copyright in an AI-generated work in Canada? As of 2025, the safest answer is: only if a human author contributed substantial creative effort to the final work. There needs to be some human “skill and judgment” or creative spark for a work to be protected.
If the AI was just a tool in your hands, for instance, you used AI to enhance or assemble content that you guided then your contributions are protected and you are the author of the overall work. But if an AI truly created the material with you providing little more than a prompt or idea, the law may treat that output as having no human author, and thus no copyright.
For now, anyone using AI in creative projects should keep documentation of their own input and creative choices. Emphasize the parts of the work where you exercised judgment or selected elements because those are likely what copyright will cover. And remember that copyright in AI-generated content is a fast-moving area.
The thing is, many of these guidelines are related to finalized products fully created by AI. As in, the AI produced a written or drawn work at the end of it that on it’s own is the product (Eg. an article or an image). This will probably apply to code in some reasonable way, but at the end of the day there’s only so many ways to write code since it’s syntax and not as flexible as language. It actually has to produce something that works, so there are far less finite arrangements.
If you were to compare code written by two people at two companies, doing a very similar project, you wouldn’t be surprised to find two pieces of code doing almost the same thing in the same syntax, barring synthetic sugar like naming and coding conventions. Neither will likely have violated the other’s copyright since simultaneous invention is a thing. And if they happened to have similar prior experiences, it’s even more likely.
Likewise, the way the code was incorporated into a project as a whole might sufficiently constitute a human contribution, and perhaps even the more important contribution. You likely wouldn’t retain the copyright on the specific snippet, but rarely are small code snippets enough on their own to claim copyright over to begin with. It’s the program or library or system as a whole that’s the finished product.
That’s not how this works.
The legal effect of AI generated code on software licenses is untested in court and AFAIK has no explicit laws. So really no one knows how it will work yet.
The US Copyright Office has updated its guidelines:
In Canada, where I live:
https://www.foundationsoflaw.com/post/can-you-claim-copyright-in-ai-generated-works-in-canada
Makes sense to me.
The thing is, many of these guidelines are related to finalized products fully created by AI. As in, the AI produced a written or drawn work at the end of it that on it’s own is the product (Eg. an article or an image). This will probably apply to code in some reasonable way, but at the end of the day there’s only so many ways to write code since it’s syntax and not as flexible as language. It actually has to produce something that works, so there are far less finite arrangements.
If you were to compare code written by two people at two companies, doing a very similar project, you wouldn’t be surprised to find two pieces of code doing almost the same thing in the same syntax, barring synthetic sugar like naming and coding conventions. Neither will likely have violated the other’s copyright since simultaneous invention is a thing. And if they happened to have similar prior experiences, it’s even more likely.
Likewise, the way the code was incorporated into a project as a whole might sufficiently constitute a human contribution, and perhaps even the more important contribution. You likely wouldn’t retain the copyright on the specific snippet, but rarely are small code snippets enough on their own to claim copyright over to begin with. It’s the program or library or system as a whole that’s the finished product.
This is the part that will definitely not work.
It is now, strycore made it happen.