A senior developer in San Francisco had used Claude Code for work projects and for a personal fitness tracking app built on evenings and weekends. His company updated its IP policy and claimed everything he had built with AI assistance, including the personal app, arguing that because Claude had access to open work files in the IDE, any AI output was a derivative work of company IP.

Agentic coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex generate code that may be uncopyrightable, owned by your employer, or contaminated by open source licenses you cannot see.

If you are shipping AI-assisted code and have not thought about any of this, this piece is for you.