this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2026
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The only way "AI clean rooming" is possible is if the model was trained with verifiably clean room code. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc only exist because they took our work without paying or asking for permission. Anthropic has a profitable business because they're reselling the thing they built with our work. They built X with Y, but they didn't pay for Y. It's as clear an example of copyright infringement as possible.
So is your article about "clean rooming" specifically, or is that just a term you're misuing here informally to refer to LLM-powered reverse engineering in general?
My article was about how copyright law actually supports projects like PhotoCraft and ArtCraft (the software that reverse engineered Photoshop and other adobe products) and REA because, under current law (which is a long case review), clean rooming is okay. It goes back to the Compaq case and a few others. It relies on the idea that copyright protects expression, not function, and if you put a team of lawyers in a room with software and they purely describe the function of the software, and they hand that document to a team of engineers, that is fine under copyright law because it breaks the chain of expression. There's much more detail, but my argument is that AI clean rooming projects are good for consumers in this regard, but that software patents for would be used more expansively in the coming years to counter those products. And so on and so forth. There are like eight more steps and guesses after that, but that was the gist.
As a personal thing, I agree with your conclusions for the most part. I just think there's a lot more to consider in getting there. The road is much more complex than most people give it credit for.
I would counter that "AI clean rooming" is not clean rooming, because they are feeding the actual code to imitate directly. Even ignoring the training, it has, verbatim, the object code and is trying to make code that compiles to match the object code. It isn't deriving the functions to a spec and the using the spec to go back to code.
I would further counter that the Compaq case dovetails with the idea that APIs are broadly not copyrightable in and of themselves. Compaq cloned a thin ABI layer, which was not considered substantial by itself, so the argument rested with whether the implementing backend necessarily infringed in resemblance or if resemblance derived from merely following a similar asked. If you clone an entire application down to the human presentation, I think no "clean room" argument would overcome that you cloned far more than some thin application to library interface.