Debate over GPL license propagation to AI models trained on open-source code remains unresolved as lawsuits continue; theory popular in 2021 now less mainstream but not refuted, with Doe v. GitHub and GEMA v. OpenAI cases pending decisions in US and Germany.

The Current State of the Theory that GPL Propagates to AI Models Trained on GPL Code

When GitHub Copilot was launched in 2021, the fact that its training data included a vast amount of Open Source code publicly available on GitHub attracted significant attention, sparking lively debates regarding licensing. While there were issues concerning conditions such as attribution required by most licenses, there was a particularly high volume of discourse suggesting that the conditions of copyleft licenses, such as the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), would propagate to the model i...