Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft

With sufficient obfuscation (which models seem to provide intrinsically), how would anyone know to sue? On top of that, only the most major sorts of litigation have the legal force to pierce even the flimsiest of obfuscation... this is likely all moot.

If some GPL-licensed group were to sue some commercial software project that they do not have the source code for, what would even give it away? But they throw $1 million at a lawyer who can at least get it to the discovery phase somehow, and the source code is provided. It looks to be shit, but maybe an expert witness would come along and say "that looks inspired by the open source project". Where does it go from there? The model is a black box, but maybe you've got a superhero lawyer who manages to rope in Anthropic or OpenAI, and you can see how it produced the code given those prompts. What now? Are there any expert witnesses who both could say and would say that it was "bulk copying-pasting code". And if it were, what jury is going to go for that theory of the crime? Copying-and-pasting, but the code doesn't match, except in short little strings that any code might match. This isn't a slamdunk, and it's not going to proceed very far unless it's another Google-vs-Oracle shitfest.