Simon Willison

@simonwblogFeatured

Creator of Datasette, Django co-creator. Daily AI experiments, prompt injection research, LLM security.

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Can AI Coding Agents Relicense Open Source? The chardet Precedent

3 min5 Mar 2026

A maintainer attempted to relicense the chardet library by rewriting it with Claude Code, but Simon Willison argues this fails the legal standard for a clean-room rewrite on two counts: the maintainer carries 12 years of codebase knowledge, and Claude's training data likely included the original code. This creates an unresolved legal question about whether AI-assisted rewrites can ever produce genuinely clean IP.

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