The clean-room approach created a novel legal puzzle. Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) observed that Anthropic faces a dilemma: a Python rewrite constitutes a new creative work potentially outside DMCA reach. If Anthropic claims the AI-generated transformative rewrite infringes copyright, it could undermine their own defense in training-data copyright cases - the same argument that AI-generated outputs from copyrighted inputs constitute fair use.
The only moral justification for an AI rewrite. Love it.
My guess they are not even gonna challenge the “clean room” rewrite legally: the damage is done and it’s not really gonna be mitigated if they manage to take down the rewrite.
Anthropic pulled the npm package within hours and issued a statement: the exposure was “a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach.”
I’m sure they chose the words “human error” to also imply the error is not to blame on their LLM, which remains an open question after reading the article (and likely will forever, although at the very least it would seem like the LLM did not detect this mistake).
Fun, but annoying when articles like this reference online resources like github repos and hackernews threads without linking to them anywhere
https://github.com/instructkr/claw-code Maybe the hackernews thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47584540
