this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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LLM-Driven Large Code Rewrites With Relicensing Are The Latest AI Concern (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 1 day ago by cm0002@libretechni.ca to c/opensource@programming.dev
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The newest open-source concern around AI that is seeing a lot of interest this weekend is when large language models / AI code generators may rewrite large parts of a codebase and then the "developers" claiming an alternative license incompatible with the original source license. This became a real concern this week with a popular Python project experiencing an AI-driven code rewrite and now published under an alternative license that its original author does not agree with and incompatible with the original code.

Chardet as a Python character encoding detector with its v7.0 release last week was a "ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet." This rewrite was largely driven via AI/LLM and claims to be up to 41x faster and offer an array of new features. But with this AI-driven rewrite, the license shifted from the LGPL to MIT.

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[–] grue@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

They're trying to launder away the copyleft so that they can tivoize and enshittify.