How AI Is Breaking Open Source

Language models consume code licensed under GPL and Creative Commons without meeting the requirements of those licenses. Chester Wisniewski, principal researcher at Sophos, wrote about this in detail. In his observation, GitHub is now overloaded with automated pull requests from bots that are crowding out real contributors. He calls this the destruction of the social contract that has held open source together for the past 35 years.

I work in Claude Code every day and pull in open-source libraries without thinking about where they came from. If maintainers start closing their repositories in response to spam and license violations, the next generation of models will train on a much thinner base. This is already happening, just slowly.