alt Hacker News> But then the clean room implementations started showing up. People had taken Anthropic’s source code and rewritten Claude Code from scratch in other languages like Python and Rust.
Seems like the phrase "clean room" is the new "nonplussed"... how does this make any sense?
Replies
aeternum • today at 5:06 AM
The most fitting method would be to be to train an LLM on the Claude Code source-code (among other data).
Then use Anthropic's own argument that LLM output is original work and thus not subject to copyright.
recursive • today at 3:47 AM
I think it means you write a spec from the implementation. Then you write a new implementation from the spec. You might go so far as to do the second part in a "clean" room.
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Heya, post author here. I think I was just wrong about this assertion. I got into a discussion with a copyright lawyer over on Bluesky[^1] after I wrote this and came away reasonably convinced that this wouldn’t be a valid example of a clean room implementation.
[^1]: https://bsky.app/profile/mergesort.me/post/3mihhaliils2y