Why write open-source software at all, when the government could outlaw open-source entirely? What if an asteroid destroys Earth and there are no humans left to enjoy your work? At some point, you have to agree that a risk isn't worth worrying about. And your "worst possible outcome" is just the arbitrary outcome that you think has some subjective risk threshold. And it's certainly not one I agree with. Furthermore, calling it a "nuke" is a bad analogy because that implies that it can't be put back in the bottle once opened. In reality, we're dealing with legal definitions, which can be redefined as easily as defined.

The two main points are that:

1. Copyright cannot be assigned to an AI agent.

2. Copyrighted works require human creativity to be applied in order to be copyrighted.

For point 2 this would apply to times were AI one shots a generic prompt. But for these large PRs where multiple prompts are used and a human has decided what the design should be and how the API should look you get the human creativity required for copyright.

In regards to being a derivative work I think it would be hard to argue that an LLM is copying or modifying an existing original work. Even if it came up with an exact duplicate of a piece of code it would be hard to prove that it was a copy and not an independent recreation from scratch.

>the worst possible outcome

The worst possible outcome is they get sued and Anthropic defends them from the copyright infringement claim due to Anthopic's indemnity clause when using Claude Code.