It did come up in the discussion briefly. I think there are two big aspects to this for GHC: Copyright or lack thereof and Licensing. Lack of Copyright: GHC already uses a permissive license. Loss of copyright on parts of the code base would allow those parts to be used without carrying the BSD3 license forward. But in practice this has little effect. The user would not be able to license it as it's not under copyright at that point anyway. So use would remain permissive, although no longer under BSD3 license. To put this into other words. GHC is already not restricting use of the source. And should LLM generated parts of GHC not be covered by copyright this would not meaningfully change. This concern is primarily relevant for projects that want to *restrict* specific use cases. As the GCC project recently did in order to safeguard the applicability of the (L)GPL license. Licensing/Copyright being held by other parties: Contributions to GHC are expected to be licensed under BSD3 or compatible license. While agree that this is relevant, ultimately the responsibility of only contributing source that is compatible with GHCs licensing falls on the user, independent of the tool used in question. If there is a strong argument that companies could claim copyright over code generated by their models it would indeed be right to reject those. However as you alluded to all current providers are very explicit about granting the user all legal rights and disclaiming the rights for themselves. For example here is the relevant blurp for claude: /As between the parties and to the extent permitted by applicable law, Anthropic agrees that Customer (a) retains all rights to its Inputs, and (b) owns its Outputs. Anthropic disclaims any rights it receives to the Customer Content under these Terms. Subject to Customer’s compliance with these Terms, Anthropic hereby assigns to Customer its right, title and interest (if any) in and to Outputs./ A scenario where those providers would be able to restrict distribution of generated source in a GHC compatible way *after the fact* seems impossible to me given these terms of use. There being one caveat. This only applies if users don't violate the terms of use. So a user (re)generating swaths of code that get embedded into GHC, and then goes on to violate the terms of use could change this. Perhaps that is something worth thinking about? Overall I think the legal risks for GHC are constrained to my caveat above, at least if we ignore laws being arbitrarily rewritten and reinterpreted based on economic incentives. There is little that can be done about the later in terms of policy to protect ourselves so I don't think it should inform policy. For the former perhaps the HF would be willing to sponsor a legal consultation to clarify the possible impact of: * Soundness of the waivers to rights over generated code by the common providers. * A contributor generating code and violating the LLM providers terms of use as above. * The consequences of a possible lack of legal copyright for part of the source code. * Generated code making use liable for copyright violations against parties whos code was part of the training set. I will reach out and see if we can make this happen. Andreas On 31/07/2026 10:09, damiancoding--- via ghc-devs wrote:
Dear all,
I have thus far been perusing the LLM policy discussion from the bleachers. A lot of conversation has been had about the ethical and practical reasons to support or abolish LLM use for GHC.
However, one really important point seems to have been all but omitted from the conversation, and that is the legal aspect.
GHC, like any other project using any licensing at all, enjoys protections based in the legal system of every country it is being used and developed in. That is no small thing and is essentially what allows GHC to exist in the legal sense. A body of work untethered from this is like a person without citizenship - no one will advocate for it, and no government will back up legitimate claims around it by enforcing laws and regulations.
It is the contention of some legal scholars that having a significant (not large or overwhelming, merely significant) amount of AI based contributions in a body of work can lead to lack of recognition of its copyright in court. This opinion is already backed up by case law relating to art:https://www.theverge.com/policy/887678/supreme-court-ai-art-copyright
Such a status would put the project's protections in danger legally and could turn to foil the efforts of GHC contributors over the past numerous years.
Of course, art is not code, and I would say many people's code is not art... but absence of proof is not proof of absence. This is merely legal limbo, not legal certainty, and early indications suggest the tree may fall on the house.
In fact, who is to say that at least in some jurisdictions, AI companies couldn't go rogue and turn around and say anything that's been generated does not belong to you intellectually - it belongs to the model, and therefore to its owner, the AI company? Of course, there are explainers and assurances, but none of this is legally tested. As someone who has advised on, joined, and started lawsuits in more than a handful different legal systems, I can tell you that they are all very idiosyncratic and there is no common-sense to any of them. Local law can be extremely surprising and in fact one place's laws can contradict another place's laws.
There are also secondary effects as well. For example, can you get public funding for such a project? Can you be recommended by government entities and various organizations? Can you use or contribute to such work as a university employee, researcher, or student? This last one is particularly important for a project that lives and dies by the ability of researchers to contribute to it.
I may have simply missed it in the deluge, but I have found that there has been little to no discussion of the effect of LLM contributions on the copyright of GHC. Perhaps before entering this "Brave New World", we should see if the ice is too thin to walk on.
Especially during war time, there has been a multitude of legal documents that were proof of citizenship to one area or another. Sometimes they looked like the blue British passport that is all the rage these days, sometimes they were a tattered piece of paper in an envelope of you were lucky, with nothing more to certify its authenticity than a stamp, and a block-letter name written by someone who barely ever held a pen, at an outpost in the deep forest. This may have been all that a person, coming from a country that may not even exist anymore due to changes in war, has to go on for legal recognition as a citizen of any country. Many times such documents were ad-hoc or provisional and there wasn't even a way to check them for authenticity or correctness, if the checking was being done by a person a thousand miles away from the document's origin and who is not even able to read the alphabet let alone the language. Very often such documents would not be recognized; it was as much dep endent on the politics of the day (does the Soviet Union recognize the Croatians?) as on whether you had a pack of cigarettes to share with the militia man patrolling the path you were on. A solid passport from a powerful country got you out of trouble.
The legal system around LLM contributions is changing. Very little of it is proven and what has been proven so far shows that they enjoy no protection. For better or worse whatever imaginary lines on the ground we imagine and agree upon within our little tribe will be completely disregarded and obliterated by the machine of war that sets out the order as the legal system solidifies. To understand how this can lead to disappointment, just ask people in Finland whether they are nostalgic for their lost territory.
I believe the integration of LLM based output into GHC is an issue that requires prudence far beyond "community consensus", "robust conversations", and "good proposals". It can clearly have ramifications of legal, compliance, civic, policy, and otherwise government-related nature, should be treated seriously as such, and therefore the project should source informed analysis and recommendation from those whose job it is to do so. This in particular means we should be hiring and listening to impartial professionals and not sounding off as developers who don't know the first thing about such matters.
I say all this as someone who uses AI on the daily and has worked at a frontier AI lab that has been acquired by interests related to the US government. I think GHC is more important than being able to work on it with specific techniques. Everyone employing asbestos had the best intentions and could never have known where it would lead, but out of this period in history we have learned to be careful about employing new technology. Currently, the only people talking about this on this list are asbestos users and carpenters, and no one's thought to ask the doctors or physicists.
With best regards, Damian _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list --ghc-devs@haskell.org To unsubscribe send an email toghc-devs-leave@haskell.org