AI Writes Code Without Fear of Lawsuits, and Claude Opus 5.5 Lowers the Barrier to Entry

01 · Law and AI

US Appeals Court: AI Code Generation Doesn't Violate the DMCA

On September 16, 2026, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld an earlier dismissal of a lawsuit against Microsoft and GitHub concerning GitHub Copilot [1]. Anonymous developers had argued that Copilot violates the US DMCA because it generates code without the copyright management information (CMI) that was present in the training data.

The court disagreed. It ruled that Copilot's code-generation process creates a "new work" rather than removing or altering CMI from existing works — and it's precisely that removal or alteration of such information that triggers liability under the DMCA. In its reasoning, the court also noted that accepting the plaintiffs' interpretation would effectively replace traditional copyright protection with a DMCA-based mechanism, exposing tech companies to drastic, potentially "ruinous" damages under the statute's enhanced penalties.

This is the first US appellate ruling to directly address generative AI liability under the DMCA. That makes it a precedent-setting decision — one that could make it easier to resolve similar cases involving language models currently pending in federal courts. For companies using AI-copilot tools, it's a signal that the legal risk tied to code generation is smaller than it might have seemed just a year ago.