AI-Generated Code Licensing: Provenance, Copyleft, Ownership

Q: Who owns code written by an AI coding assistant?

The company generally controls the code its employees produce with tools under its licences, but copyright protection depends on human authorship. The US Copyright Office position, in Part 2 of its AI report from January 2025, is that prompts alone generally do not provide enough control, so heavily agent-generated modules may rest more on trade secret and contract than on copyright.

Q: Does the GitHub Copilot public code filter prevent GPL code entering my codebase?

Only partly. Code referencing checks accepted, unchanged suggestions against an index of public code using about 150 characters of context. It does not see paraphrased or edited code, multi-file ports assembled from small fragments, or code produced by other assistants. Treat it as one control at one point, not as a licence compliance programme.

Q: Do individual Copilot plans include IP indemnity?

GitHub plans page lists IP indemnity as not included on Free, Pro, Pro+ and Max individual plans. If developers expense personal plans for production work, any indemnity the company believes it has under an organisational agreement may not apply to that code. Require organisational licences for code that ships.

Q: How do I scan my own source code for copied open source?

Use an origin and licence detection tool such as ScanCode Toolkit over your repository, not just a dependency scanner over manifests. It detects licence texts, copyright notices and package origins inside your own files. Route findings through a triage policy by licence class, and block merges on strong copyleft or unlicensed matches.

Q: Is code with no licence safe to use if an AI suggests it?

No. Public code without a licence is all rights reserved by default, so an exact match to an unlicensed repository is not permissive. Remove it or replace it with a clean-room implementation or a properly licensed dependency. Asking the same model to rewrite it until it no longer matches does not cure the problem.

Q: Why does AGPL matter for a SaaS company that ships no binaries?

AGPL extends the source-sharing obligation to software users interact with over a network. A SaaS company that never distributes binaries can still trigger it by serving modified AGPL code to users. That is why triage for strong copyleft asks whether you distribute or serve the code, not only whether you ship downloads.

Q: What provenance should we record on AI-assisted commits?

Record the tool, the model, the organisational licence it ran under, and how much the human edited the result, as Git trailers enforced by a pre-commit hook. The human author must set the edit level; agents must not self-attest it. Coarse honest labels are more useful in diligence than a computed percentage of AI code.

Q: What will acquirers and enterprise customers ask about AI-generated code?

Expect questions on whether third-party copyleft code is included, how ownership of source is established, which AI tools were used under what terms, and whether licence scanning covers your own source. Per-release SPDX documents plus scan results and commit provenance let legal answer from a query instead of an emergency audit.

Satyam Kumar

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Who Owns the Code Your Agent Wrote? Licensing and Provenance for AI-Generated Code in 2026

By Satyam KumarNovember 9, 202614 min read

ai generated code code licensing open source license compliance copyleft gpl compliance agpl saas code provenance software bill of materials spdx scancode github copilot copilot code referencing ai copyright technical due diligence coding agents ip indemnity

Who Owns the Code Your Agent Wrote? Licensing and Provenance for AI-Generated Code in 2026

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Satyam Kumar

Founder & AI Architect, AppScale LLP

AI & Cloud Architect. Helping teams build systems that scale to millions.

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Who Owns the Code Your Agent Wrote? Licensing and Provenance for AI-Generated Code in 2026

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