It's pointless to make this claim without case law stating this for LLMs specifically this is merely speculation on how a judge might rule.

If the weights were produced by a purely mechanical process without any input, then I would be more inclined to believe the distinction there is significant. But as the optimization processes you've mentioned are merely tools that operate with a dataset, the provenance of that dataset becomes a factor towards copyright.

> Granted, this has yet to be fully tested in court and going to court is expensive, so it's likely that your employer would prefer to err on the side of caution and respect such attempts at model licensing anyway, similar to how one might treat a ToS agreement.

You may be conflating 2 things - the Muse model weights themselves, and what the models output when run. The former is prima facie the product of human authorship and hence has full protection of copyright law, the latter fits your characterization of likely not having copyright coverage. Meta can use the copyright on the model weights to dictate licensing terms. IANAL too.