Does the Copyright Act apply to AI anymore?
The NewYorkTimes.com asked this question “Artificial intelligence tools are making it faster than ever to reproduce creative work. Does copyright even matter anymore?” The April 22, 2026 article entitled " Anthropic’s Leaked Code Tests Copyright Challenges in A.I. Era” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/technology/anthropic-code-leak-copyright.html) included these comments from Reporter Meaghan Tobin:
Sigrid Jin, a student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, used A.I. agents to rewrite leaked Anthropic code. Credit...Grant Harder for The New York Times
Sigrid Jin was waiting to board a plane when he saw stunning news that artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic had accidentally leaked the source code for Claude Code, its popular A.I. agent. Mr. Jin, 25, an undergraduate student, scrambled to post a copy online. His worried girlfriend quickly texted him: Was he violating copyright law?
Mr. Jin turned to a team of A.I. assistants for a solution. He directed them to rewrite the leaked code in another programming language, then shared that version online. Within hours, more than 100,000 people had liked or linked to it.
Anthropic, one of the leading A.I. companies alongside OpenAI, has said the leak had been caused by human error and, citing copyright violations, demanded that GitHub, an online library of computer code, remove posts sharing the code. Thousands of posts were taken down. But Mr. Jin’s version remains online. He said Anthropic had not asked him to take it down.
It is unclear whether Anthropic, which did not respond to questions from The New York Times, is drawing a distinction with the rewritten code. Mr. Jin said he believed rewriting the code transformed it into a new work, one that Anthropic could not claim ownership over.
He said he was driven less by money or fame than by a desire to make a broader philosophical point. What is the value of copyrighted intellectual property in an era when A.I. can easily replicate not just computer code but art, music and literature in minutes?
“I just wanted to raise some ethical questions in the A.I. agent era,” he said. “Any creative work can be reproduced in a second.”
What do you think?