alt Hacker NewsGPL is not a patent. It covers the work and _derivatives_; it does not cover ideas or general knowledge. The chip in question has docs.
I fully expect that Claude wrote code that does not resemble that of the driver in the Linux tree. TFA is taking on some liability if it turns out that the code Claude wrote does largely resemble GPL'ed code, but if TFA is not comfortable with the code written by Claude not resembling existing GPL'ed code then they can just post their prompts and everyone who needs this driver can go through the process of getting Claude to code it.
In court TFA would be a defendant, so TFA needs to be sure enough that the code in question does not resemble GPL'ed code. Here in the court of public opinion I'd say that claims of GPL violation need to be backed up by a serious similarity analysis.
Prompts cannot possibly be considered derivatives of the GPL'ed code that Claude might mimic.
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Except...
In this case, they didn't really work from the chip's published documentation. They instead ultimately used a sorta-kinda open-book clean-room method, wherein they generated documentation using the source code of the GPL'd Linux driver and worked from that.
That said: I don't have a dog in this race. I don't really have an opinion of whether this is quite fine or very-much not OK. I don't know if this is something worthy of intense scrutiny, or if it should instead be accepted as progress.
(It is interesting to think about, though.)
From the file headers:
SPDX-License-Identifier: ISC
Copyright (c) 2010-2022 Broadcom Corporation
Copyright (c) brcmfmac-freebsd contributors
Based on the Linux brcmfmac driver.
I'm going to ahead and say there are copyright law nightmares, right here.