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Regarding attribution, I guess he is one of the copyright holders, so his name should be included in the new license. Unless we are talking about MIT-0.

Im not an expert on these things, but I think there is another type of attribution, that I guess is what the commenter is more concerned about, and that is academic attribution. It is part of academic culture that you attribute significant influences in the articles you write. There are no licenses as such for this, as far as I know. You do it because that is what you do in academic circles. If you dont, you are not in the club.

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I would've chosen GPL personally, but a prototype repository already existed under MIT by the time I joined as a contributor through the fellowship. Alas.
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It's actually fine to use MIT code and publish it under GPL, or to switch from MIT to GPL. You can still do that today on the repo, btw. It's the other direction that is thorny. Just fyi
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...thus implying that you'd rather the preeminent safety-focused lab not have used your interpretibility research, as they're technically a for-profit company with various closed-source assets?

I am certainly biased by a passionate distaste for IP law in general, but I am honestly curious to hear the reasoning behind it in this case.

In case it helps: this is a "research prototype", so I'd assume that seeing one or more aspects used in a highly impactful paper would be about the best possible outcome. Is this about publish-or-perish stuff, perhaps (e.g. citation "importance" for the algos)? Or maybe you're okay with this in general, but are regretful because it's Anthropic in particular?

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OP was pretty clear they wanted attribution, so you have hallucinated an entirely novel implicated desite for exclusion.

Seeing as the question posed out of "[honest curiosity]" to someone else is then immediately answered by yourself host without you even pausing to put on a sock, I think your honesty is very questionable.

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Oh sorry, I must have misunderstood! My bad, honestly; I was under the impression that GPL vs. MIT was about copyleft stuff, which would seem to preclude Anthropic's use of that project altogether. Not 100% sure how it relates to attribution still but I'll have to look into it I guess.

I don't really understand what was "answered by [my]self host" nor what a "desite for exclusion" means but it seems beside the point I think. Also not sure what the alternative to curiosity is. Like, I'd be trying to entrap this prestigious researcher in some legal sense...?

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If they are closed source and for profit, can they really be described as safety focused…
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Why can't Anthropic give credit though?
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I think I misunderstood GPL per a comment above so it's all kinda moot anyway, but my original understanding was that it was a copyleft license, so wishing it was GPL would be equivelant to wishing Anthropic had not used that work at all.

Attribution is certainly polite, and I sorta doubt Anthropic of all groups is intentionally witholding it for h-score or prestige, but that's all a much lower-stakes conversation than potential license violations. AFAIU.

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Who said they didn't? Not sure what "very little" attribution means, but presumably it doesn't mean "none."
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Doesn’t matter. AI bros don’t care. AI wash it and release it closed. What are you going to do? Sue them?
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No, unfortunately. In this era of AI rewriting entire projects from scratch, copyright protection for software is effectively dead.
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The question is less about protection than enforcement, I'd say. Courts may come to very different conclusions from what tech people would expect.
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Protection and enforcement are kinda two sides of the same coin in most IP law. IP essentially grants you exclusivity for your works, and your protection comes from how well you can enforce that exclusivity. As an example, piracy exists largely because copyright holders simply can’t enforce their exclusive rights to distribution effectively on the vast, distributed Internet.

It’s still early days, true, and courts may find legal reasoning to address this... But I fear this stems from a fundamental yet little-known flaw in copyright for code, based on a legislative hack, which can only be made worse by caselaw. I ranted about it a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320875

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A small academic lab is going to sue a trillion dollar company with any sort of success?
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Yeah, enforcement is the much bigger issue. If the IP got bought out by a giant lab, the situation could change quite substantially.
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