AI Coding Agents Come with Legal Risk

AI coding agents are poised to take over a large chunk of software development in coming years, but the change will come with intellectual property legal risk, some lawyers say.

AI-powered coding agents will be a step forward from the AI-based coding assistants, or copilots, used now by many programmers to write snippets of code. But as coding agents potentially write more software and take work away from junior developers, organizations will need to monitor the output of their robot coders, according to tech-savvy lawyers. Media outlets and entertainers have already filed several AI copyright cases in US courts, with plaintiffs accusing AI vendors of using their material to train AI models or copying their material in outputs, notes Jeffrey Gluck, a lawyer at IP-focused law firm Panitch Schwarze. The same thing could happen with software code, even though companies don’t typically share their source code, he says. “Does the output infringe something that someone else has done?” he posits. “The more likely the AI was trained using an author’s work as training data, the more likely it is that the output is going to look like that data.”

To read what Ilia Badeev, Head of Data Science at Trevolution Group, says, click here