Is it against the law for an LLM to read LGPL-licensed code?

That’s a complex question that isn’t solved yet. Clearly, regurgitating verbatim LGPL code in large chunks would be unlawful. What’s much less clear is a) how large do those chunks need to be to trigger LGPL violations? A single line? Two? A function? What if it’s trivial? And b) are all outputs of a system which has received LGPL code as an input necessarily derivative?

If I learn how to code in Python exclusively from reading LGPL code, and then go away and write something new, it’s clear that I haven’t committed any violation of copyright under existing law, even if all I’m doing as a human is rearranging tokens I understand from reading LGPL code semantically to achieve new result.

It’s a trying time for software and the legal system. I don’t have the answers, but whether you like them or not, these systems are here to stay, and we need to learn how to live with them.