A lot of folks talking about the legality basis of this approach, I think the focus should be more around the true moat behind these hype growth hack companies out there.
This sort of exposure is good, in my opinion it enables competition to emerge with true business moat rather than just "do it first, do it fast, worry last" type of thing we're seeing.
There are gonna be some really interesting legal decisions to read in the coming years, that’s for sure…
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The rest of this comment is irrelevant, but leaving for posterity, I had the wrong Viktor - it's getviktor.com not viktor.ai:
Edit: this one particularly interesting to me as both parties are in the EU. VIKTOR.ai is a Dutch company and the author of this post is Polish.
The ToS for Viktor.ai include the following fun passages:
> 18.1. The Agreement and these Terms & Conditions are governed by Dutch law and the Agreement and these Terms & Conditions will be interpreted in accordance with Dutch law.
18.2. All disputes arising from or arising in connection with the Agreement and/or the Terms & Conditions will be submitted exclusively to the competent court in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
7.3. The Customer is not permitted to change, remove or make unrecognizable any mark showing VIKTOR's Intellectual Property Rights to the Software. The Customer is not permitted to use or register any trademark or design or any domain name of VIKTOR or a similar name or sign in any country.
8.5. The Customer may not cause or allow any reproduction, imitation, duplication, copying, sale, resale, leasing or trading of the Services and/or the Software, or any part thereof.
Terms of service might matter more for terminating that user account. Whole ordeal is just plain copyright violation. The author had no licence to that internal code, and whitewashing it with LLM will achieve nothing. That case is much clearer than that recent GPL->BSD attempt story.
If LLM-generated code isn't considered a derivative work of the original, then whether the author was licensed to use the code doesn't matter. But I'm sure the courts will rule in favor of your view regardless. Laundering GPL is in corps' interest and laundering their code is not.
I think it comes down to the company's appetite for legal action, doesn't it? This case is imo pretty clear but the vibe has quite the smell of Oracle v Google to me.
But, yeah. More than likely this case is a simple account termination and some kind of "you can't call your clone 'openviktor'" letter.
According to US courts, the output can't be copyrighted at all. It's automatically in public domain after the "whitewash", regardless of original copyright.
Isn't this exactly what LLMs themselves do? They ingest other people's data and reproduce a slightly modified version of it. That allows AI companies to claim the work is transformative and thus fair use.
It's also disingenuous to call it open source as that might tempt others to use it believing that it actually is open source.
Let's call it what it is - stolen IP and released without permission of the author. Sure, it's good that it opens the debate as to whether that's ethical given that's essentially what the model itself is doing, but it's very clear in this instance that he's just asked for and been given a copy of source that has a clear ownership. That's about as clear cut as obtaining e.g. commercial server-side code and distributing it in contravention of the licence.
I could do the same thing but not publish it, still getting the value of their product without legal concerns. Now, what happens when it becomes even easier thanks to AI improving, and takes few hours instead of few days?
You could certainly do that in private but that doesn't mean it's not 'without legal concerns'. But, not shouting about it and not creating a repo called 'openviktor' would probably be a safer bet.
I certainly think the whole idea of IP ownership as related to software will become very interesting from a legal standpoint in the coming years. Personally I think that, over time, the legal challenges will become pretty overwhelming and a sort of legal bankruptcy will be declared at some point in one direction or another (as in, allowing this to happen or making it extremely easy to bring judgement and punishment, similar to spam laws). However, I would not want to be the first to find out, especially in Europe.
Nice. Probably worth making a local copy before it gets taken down.
(Re: legal - why even bother with a court decision when it’s on GitHub? A takedown is much simpler. We've seen this before, like when Meta went after people reverse-engineering their API)
That said there may not be much here thats actually protectable. It's mostly a CLI orchestrating other tools, and the same functionality could likely be reproduced fairly easily, especially with AI.
Still, props to him for writing a proper blog post and explaining the process
Every part of this is genuinely funny. Viktor launching basically OpenClaw for slack (because claw is MIT so yolo let's go mac some monnney and PJ outta Dubai etc etc). Some guy getting all their source code just by asking Viktor for it. Then rebuilding their core in a couple days because there's basically nothing there. push MIT to Github. TeamViktor's faces surely? But they're busy diamond handsing all the way to the moon so probably don't even care. XD
40's as well but first line is basically, hey here's some MIT licensed code we can do whatever we want with it, surely we can use it to make some money to the point we can afford private jets in and out of Dubai.
"TeamViktor's faces surely?" = imagine the looks on their faces
"diamond handsing to the moon" = hanging onto a situation that looks bad now hoping it gets better, throwing good money after bad, the opposite of cutting your losses.
Exactly, the team designed their own agent architecture tailored to slack and enterprise setting, that is not based on any popular agent architecture like OpenClaw, NanoClaw, IronClaw or any others that I checked against.
(I don't know anything about OpenClaw and on a deeper level, I don't wish to learn about it either considering all the security implications that it generally has)
I find it fascinating that this is just some _plumbing_ around some LLM - sold as a product and "AI coworker". They don't own the LLM model. You're just one silent update from not delivering what you promised.
"just" is doing a lot of work there. There's a stack, and everyone is fighting and racing to figure out which parts of the stack are commodities and which have protectable IP.
For example, years ago someone might have said: "Software programs are "just" some instructions on top of a computer, which does the actual computing work. The software companies don't own the computer. The next version of the computer might not even be capable of running the software." And for some kinds of software, they'd be right. Some programs turned out to be more replaceable than others.
I assume the GetViktor folks are hoping that some combination of know-how and learnings from real customer interactions and data will help them build or find a sustainable competitive advantage in some niche.
> They don't own the LLM model. You're just one silent update from not delivering what you promised.
This is true but a small risk IMO. Worst case they can shift to open-weight LLMs for inference. I would bet on LLMs being an increasingly commodity part of the stack.
Wrapping other companies services is a popular business since decades. Technically, this even predates software. The more fascinating part is, that this became semi-automated with LLMs, and how thin the wrapping now is.
Ignorering the questionable legality of this entire thing, which might fall out in favor of it being a legal activity. Calling the project OpenViktor is as dumb as committing secrets to GitHub. For the love of reason call it something else.
There is no doubt that if this goes to court you are only hurting your own chances at any reasonable defense by deciding on mirroring the naming like that. And for what? Saying you created an opensource product with no tie to their branding would convey the same effect.
Reverse engineering means understanding how a system works internally. So it is reverse engineering of a kind, just very different (and admittedly simpler) than e.g. decompiling execs
I just want to point out _how easy it is_ to build any of these tools yourself.
I got inspired by nano-claw and built on some of it's ideas to build a whole k8s hosted autonomous agent platform and got it into production in 2 weeks. It's just some api calls and container orchestration. The only hard problem _and it is hard_, is securing it, because you basically have to treat the agents as potentially malicious.
Agree, anything that agent has access to is like giving it to malicious user. Especially when agent is exposed to different users that should have different permission levels
A lot of folks talking about the legality basis of this approach, I think the focus should be more around the true moat behind these hype growth hack companies out there.
This sort of exposure is good, in my opinion it enables competition to emerge with true business moat rather than just "do it first, do it fast, worry last" type of thing we're seeing.
There are gonna be some really interesting legal decisions to read in the coming years, that’s for sure…
---
The rest of this comment is irrelevant, but leaving for posterity, I had the wrong Viktor - it's getviktor.com not viktor.ai:
Edit: this one particularly interesting to me as both parties are in the EU. VIKTOR.ai is a Dutch company and the author of this post is Polish.
The ToS for Viktor.ai include the following fun passages:
> 18.1. The Agreement and these Terms & Conditions are governed by Dutch law and the Agreement and these Terms & Conditions will be interpreted in accordance with Dutch law.
18.2. All disputes arising from or arising in connection with the Agreement and/or the Terms & Conditions will be submitted exclusively to the competent court in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
7.3. The Customer is not permitted to change, remove or make unrecognizable any mark showing VIKTOR's Intellectual Property Rights to the Software. The Customer is not permitted to use or register any trademark or design or any domain name of VIKTOR or a similar name or sign in any country.
8.5. The Customer may not cause or allow any reproduction, imitation, duplication, copying, sale, resale, leasing or trading of the Services and/or the Software, or any part thereof.
Terms of service might matter more for terminating that user account. Whole ordeal is just plain copyright violation. The author had no licence to that internal code, and whitewashing it with LLM will achieve nothing. That case is much clearer than that recent GPL->BSD attempt story.
If LLM-generated code isn't considered a derivative work of the original, then whether the author was licensed to use the code doesn't matter. But I'm sure the courts will rule in favor of your view regardless. Laundering GPL is in corps' interest and laundering their code is not.
1 reply →
I think it comes down to the company's appetite for legal action, doesn't it? This case is imo pretty clear but the vibe has quite the smell of Oracle v Google to me.
But, yeah. More than likely this case is a simple account termination and some kind of "you can't call your clone 'openviktor'" letter.
According to US courts, the output can't be copyrighted at all. It's automatically in public domain after the "whitewash", regardless of original copyright.
https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2026/03/us-supreme-court-de...
1 reply →
Isn't this exactly what LLMs themselves do? They ingest other people's data and reproduce a slightly modified version of it. That allows AI companies to claim the work is transformative and thus fair use.
Someone tell every startup in YC they are criminals
There are also new jobs emerging to safeguard a companies assets that were created by AI. New white hat hacking opportunities.
Anyways, however you put this, I see this as a property theft and taking pride at open sourcing does not justify it.
It's also disingenuous to call it open source as that might tempt others to use it believing that it actually is open source.
Let's call it what it is - stolen IP and released without permission of the author. Sure, it's good that it opens the debate as to whether that's ethical given that's essentially what the model itself is doing, but it's very clear in this instance that he's just asked for and been given a copy of source that has a clear ownership. That's about as clear cut as obtaining e.g. commercial server-side code and distributing it in contravention of the licence.
5 replies →
it's not viktor.ai it's getviktor.com
Ah, you're right. Headquartered in Delaware. Oh well. Thanks for spotting!
I could do the same thing but not publish it, still getting the value of their product without legal concerns. Now, what happens when it becomes even easier thanks to AI improving, and takes few hours instead of few days?
You could certainly do that in private but that doesn't mean it's not 'without legal concerns'. But, not shouting about it and not creating a repo called 'openviktor' would probably be a safer bet.
I certainly think the whole idea of IP ownership as related to software will become very interesting from a legal standpoint in the coming years. Personally I think that, over time, the legal challenges will become pretty overwhelming and a sort of legal bankruptcy will be declared at some point in one direction or another (as in, allowing this to happen or making it extremely easy to bring judgement and punishment, similar to spam laws). However, I would not want to be the first to find out, especially in Europe.
1 reply →
Nice. Probably worth making a local copy before it gets taken down.
(Re: legal - why even bother with a court decision when it’s on GitHub? A takedown is much simpler. We've seen this before, like when Meta went after people reverse-engineering their API)
That said there may not be much here thats actually protectable. It's mostly a CLI orchestrating other tools, and the same functionality could likely be reproduced fairly easily, especially with AI.
Still, props to him for writing a proper blog post and explaining the process
Thanks, I put some effort into the blog. The process might be even more useful and reusable than the code itself for many people.
Every part of this is genuinely funny. Viktor launching basically OpenClaw for slack (because claw is MIT so yolo let's go mac some monnney and PJ outta Dubai etc etc). Some guy getting all their source code just by asking Viktor for it. Then rebuilding their core in a couple days because there's basically nothing there. push MIT to Github. TeamViktor's faces surely? But they're busy diamond handsing all the way to the moon so probably don't even care. XD
>MIT so yolo let's go mac some monnney and PJ outta Dubai etc etc
>TeamViktor's faces surely? But they're busy diamond handsing all the way to the moon so probably don't even care. XD
would anyone please be so kind to translate these parts of this comment into something a 45+ year old would understand?
40's as well but first line is basically, hey here's some MIT licensed code we can do whatever we want with it, surely we can use it to make some money to the point we can afford private jets in and out of Dubai.
"TeamViktor's faces surely?" = imagine the looks on their faces "diamond handsing to the moon" = hanging onto a situation that looks bad now hoping it gets better, throwing good money after bad, the opposite of cutting your losses.
1 reply →
From one “old guy” to another:
PJ = private jet
Diamond hands and to the moon are crypto trader slang
Makes me laugh answering this question, because the meaning is all there if you skip over all the meme words.
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I don't get it, what OP actually reverse engineered? OpenClaw itself? Of did Viktor team created their own OpenClaw like agent?
Exactly, the team designed their own agent architecture tailored to slack and enterprise setting, that is not based on any popular agent architecture like OpenClaw, NanoClaw, IronClaw or any others that I checked against.
Doesn't Openclaw already support Slack? https://docs.openclaw.ai/channels/slack
(I don't know anything about OpenClaw and on a deeper level, I don't wish to learn about it either considering all the security implications that it generally has)
I find it fascinating that this is just some _plumbing_ around some LLM - sold as a product and "AI coworker". They don't own the LLM model. You're just one silent update from not delivering what you promised.
"just" is doing a lot of work there. There's a stack, and everyone is fighting and racing to figure out which parts of the stack are commodities and which have protectable IP.
For example, years ago someone might have said: "Software programs are "just" some instructions on top of a computer, which does the actual computing work. The software companies don't own the computer. The next version of the computer might not even be capable of running the software." And for some kinds of software, they'd be right. Some programs turned out to be more replaceable than others.
I assume the GetViktor folks are hoping that some combination of know-how and learnings from real customer interactions and data will help them build or find a sustainable competitive advantage in some niche.
> They don't own the LLM model. You're just one silent update from not delivering what you promised.
This is true but a small risk IMO. Worst case they can shift to open-weight LLMs for inference. I would bet on LLMs being an increasingly commodity part of the stack.
Wrapping other companies services is a popular business since decades. Technically, this even predates software. The more fascinating part is, that this became semi-automated with LLMs, and how thin the wrapping now is.
Thin wrappers over an LLM has been an extremely popular grift for the past few years.
Agree, and cost of creating those thin wrappers is rapidly approaching zero
Soon renamed OpenViktawer, then MoltVik.
Behold VikTok, the new competitor to Moltbook, soon to be acquihired by Oracle.
and acquisition by MoltBook at the end haha
How did you make the image at https://github.com/zggf-zggf/openviktor/blob/main/docs/asset...?
Ignorering the questionable legality of this entire thing, which might fall out in favor of it being a legal activity. Calling the project OpenViktor is as dumb as committing secrets to GitHub. For the love of reason call it something else.
Is the name Victor trademarkable?
Sure it is:
https://uspto.report/TM/78326416/
https://uspto.report/TM/74713937/
https://uspto.report/TM/74619284/
https://uspto.report/TM/87438245/
https://uspto.report/TM/77936273/
https://uspto.report/TM/86747705/
https://uspto.report/TM/78638776/
https://uspto.report/TM/73359604/
https://uspto.report/TM/98066821/
https://uspto.report/TM/97979922/
…and many more.
Is office?
There is no doubt that if this goes to court you are only hurting your own chances at any reasonable defense by deciding on mirroring the naming like that. And for what? Saying you created an opensource product with no tie to their branding would convey the same effect.
1 reply →
Is this reverse-engineering or "just" data exfiltration
Reverse engineering means understanding how a system works internally. So it is reverse engineering of a kind, just very different (and admittedly simpler) than e.g. decompiling execs
I just want to point out _how easy it is_ to build any of these tools yourself.
I got inspired by nano-claw and built on some of it's ideas to build a whole k8s hosted autonomous agent platform and got it into production in 2 weeks. It's just some api calls and container orchestration. The only hard problem _and it is hard_, is securing it, because you basically have to treat the agents as potentially malicious.
It's because of this hard problem that I'm thinking I should keep using Viktor (getviktor.com) instead of running this OpenViktor.
The company may not do a perfect job of security either, but I figure they'll do a better job than I can as a solo practitioner.
Agree, anything that agent has access to is like giving it to malicious user. Especially when agent is exposed to different users that should have different permission levels
Seems unethical.
I agree. There's so little value in Viktor, that it is unethical to charge for it.
"Driven by curiosity and envy, I tested it out." Two days of work driven by envy. Not what open source should be about.
It was sarcasm ;)
Came across as honest. Because why else.