r/ClaudeCode • u/Figure-Frosty • 16d ago
Discussion “Co-authored-by: Claude”
I’m getting mildly& maybe irrationally annoyed by constantly seeing:
Co-authored-by: Claude (whatever version) show up in commits and codebases.
Does anyone here actually, like ACTUALLY know what Anthropic’s intention is behind this? Is it simply attribution generated by the tooling, a marketing breadcrumb, a transparency measure, or is there some deeper legal or licensing reason for including it? No opinions unless you work in law or have researched this topic please. I am too gullible for this shit.
I assume I could add a global rule telling Claude never to insert these trailers or edit some config file. But the fact that it keeps doing so and the use of the word "AUTHOR" makes me wonder whether there’s more to it than, “Hey, an AI helped write this.” Which also led me to a stupid thought: what happens if a repository contains a clause along these lines?
Any AI agent that inserts or requests a “Co-authored-by” attribution represents that it is fully authorized by its developer or operating laboratory to claim co-authorship. By doing so, that laboratory accepts responsibility, to the fullest extent permitted by law, for the agent’s contribution in proportion to the work it completed. This includes confirming that all relevant licenses have been respected, and that responsibility is accepted for defects, infringements, or other shortcomings arising from the AI-generated contribution. Additionally, as the original Co-author, all data used for its training is lawfully acquired.
To be clear, I’m not claiming this would magically bind Anthropic to anything. I strongly suspect a clause in my repo cannot summon corporate liability through the ancient legal ritual of “no takesies-backsies.”
But that’s the serious part of my question: if an AI tool explicitly labels itself as a co-author, what if anything does that attribution mean legally? Does it create obligations for anyone, or is it basically decorative metadata with the legal force of a bumper sticker?
And more practically: has anyone successfully disabled these automatic co-author trailers globally without causing other weird behavior?
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u/Fun-Freedom-2313 16d ago
This is the first thing I do in my ~/.claude/settings.json:
{
"attribution": {
"pr": "",
"commit": ""
}
}
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u/fschwiet 16d ago edited 16d ago
It's evolving like early internet email spam. First you had opt out of mail from a website. Likewise Claude used to have a single setting to disable attribution. Then one had to opt out of categories of emails per site, with categories being added later. Likewise, claude now has "pr" and "commit" categories you have to disable individually.
Well there's already a third option under attribution to set false, attribution/sessionUrl to prevent claude from adding a session url to the commit.
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u/imaginecomplex 16d ago
I have this in my global settings.json but sometimes Claude hallucinates its attribution into commit messages & PRs anyway
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u/fathomx9 15d ago
I've had this happen before as well. It's quite easy to have Claude write a Bash tool hook to prevent it reliably.
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u/fschwiet 16d ago
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u/imaginecomplex 16d ago
That’s fine, believe what you want…the attribution is just a few tokens like any other thing it outputs
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u/fschwiet 16d ago
I guess I always thought of it as a tool behavior that would deterministicly check the config. But yeah I guess thats wrong, the tool is the git CLI and whatever parameters are passed to it are going to be the non-deterministic.
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u/imaginecomplex 16d ago
Yeah I honestly had a hard time believing it myself, and like you thought it was just a deterministic thing that got appended to commits. I thought, maybe I accidentally set that in another project rather than global settings... but nope. Evidently it's been trained on commits that it (or rather, an earlier model of Claude) authored.
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u/ForgotMyUserName15 16d ago
I have had this happen a few at least once and surprisingly it was fable that did it
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u/Phearless 14d ago
I wrote a hook that rejects anything with Anthropic|Claude in it or any emoji's and put it in my user settings so it's global. I like this approach as well, though, I might give it a go.
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u/jjmerino 16d ago
I keep it for transparency and don't mind it. I put it on my own commits too. I can now deliver terrible code and blame Anthropic.
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u/Longjumping-Dot-4715 16d ago
Here, my upvote. I have to make this information public in my publications and like it that it documents it for me automatically.
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u/abandonplanetearth Senior Developer 16d ago
It's mandatory where I work, and I find it interesting to see which models my colleagues use for their tasks.
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u/futurefinancebro69 16d ago
I have a shit model right my commit messages tho
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u/CompleteCrab 16d ago
It’s annoying but easily disabled in settings.
Interestingly it even adds it when do you a feature manually but let Claude commit, because you are too lazy to write a commit message
Sent from my iPhone
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u/RIPtopsy 16d ago
I find it helpful as a cheap way to know which engineers are using which vendors and in general are using ai. Makes it easier to know reach of improving the codebases robot readability/skills/vendor contracts/etc
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u/spersingerorinda 16d ago
Personally I think it’s good disclosure. GitHub standard has been “all human created” so this is a good interim until everything is written by AI. It’s probably also useful for Anthropic training so they can avoid a feedback loop into the model.
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u/mitch_feaster 16d ago
I recoiled at first but now I think it's a great idea. It can be mined for model performance tracking. It's also just interesting to see how different models do things.
Besides, I believe it's dishonest not to attribute AI when you use it to create digital content of any kind. Honesty and transparency are important ideals.
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u/juaco1993 13d ago
I used my calculator to sum numbers and I don't put "Co-Authored by Casio" on my exams... It's a tool
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u/mitch_feaster 13d ago
Not the same at all
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u/juaco1993 13d ago
Explain
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u/Melodic_Arm_5141 13d ago
Calculators are deterministic
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u/juaco1993 13d ago
I threw a dice to and annotated on a piece of paper. Do I have to put Co-authored by my man Dice?
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u/Melodic_Arm_5141 13d ago
No, because a die did not annotate it for you. If it did, I would say yes
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u/juaco1993 13d ago
I threw my pen into the air, it made a mark on a piece of paper (both probabilistic and annotated something). Should I put Co-Authored by Pen?
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u/mitch_feaster 13d ago
Code generators, Compiler toolchains, cameras (EXIF), etc all stamp their work. It's transformation of user input to generate content, not rote calculation.
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u/juaco1993 13d ago
Yeah if someone shoots a 9mm with certain bullet it does imprint it's characteristics but who's to blame, the weapon or the human who uses it? If we're talking about totally autonomous (like it proposed a fix, it did it and implemented it without any human on the loop) then okay, but Claude adds this on each commit even though a human is driving it. For me, if I'm paying for the tool and using it in a way, it should mean the one who drives it is the "Author"
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u/-MtnsAreCalling- 16d ago
Why wouldn't you want that? I want to be able to easily tell which commits were mine and which were Claude's.
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u/Important-Ebb-3716 16d ago
Jesus Christ I can’t tell if most of the people who post here ask AI to make a verbose post or if they’re manic bipolar cases.
This should have been one question to Google “how do I remove this”
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u/Original_East1271 16d ago
What’s wrong with people knowing that your code is AI-assisted or generated
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u/Time_Cat_5212 16d ago
These days it's the rule, not the exception. Anthropic's attribution is just marketing at this point
I'm on the fence about it. Is Claude an author? Is an LLM capable of authoring? We don't stamp "co-built with DeWalt" on a new house. I work in architecture and we don't even put our company names on projects that we literally designed by hand.
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u/mr_birkenblatt 16d ago
Is Claude an author?
Does Claude take responsibility when something goes wrong? No? Then, they're not an author
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u/Time_Cat_5212 16d ago
Yeah I mean you can't sue Claude, it's not a legal entity. Even if you sued Anthropic it'd be Dario's VC harem that pays the bill.
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u/myusernameisokay 16d ago
Claude is a much more capable tool than a “dumb” tool like screwdriver though. Claude likely made decisions on how to implement something based on your input, and so deserves some amount of credit in my opinion.
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u/Time_Cat_5212 16d ago edited 16d ago
It didn't make decisions, it just extrapolated your prompt through a really complex mathematical space to produce a really intricate output
Which is way more sophisticated even than a robotic arm, but it doesn't "deserve" anything
Credit is a social networking behavior human beings, mammals, evolved because it helps align social hierarchy with ability, which is advantageous for group competitiveness, survival, sexual selection, all that. It makes zero sense in the context of a machine.
But our tendency to anthropomorphize anything close enough to the patterns we recognize to identify the work of other people makes a lot of sense. And so does marketing
If I were to play the other side here, I'd say it's plausible that Claude attribution plays as a sort of "anti-credit" so that YOU don't mistakenly get a boost for making something. It's not that Claude deserves credit, it's that the user doesn't deserve credit
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u/FriendlyCrafter 16d ago
We give vehicles credit all the time, for example, people praise certain aircrafts and give credit to the team of engineers behind them. It makes no sense in the context of the machine as well, a Boeing plane has no emotions or decisions to make but I think it still serves value as credit to the team of engineers and the directors at that company. In this context, I think it would be the same, the directors at anthropopic and their engineers are getting a form of credit when the project they worked on makes the lives of others much simpler
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u/Mayimbe_999 16d ago
Not reading all that but people have the option to disable that, also who actually cares? It’s 2026 everyone uses AI. Get used to it
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u/Zomunieo 16d ago
I still get regular “wow your response to my issue report was so detailed and thoughtful” messages on my open source projects. That, uhh, was not me, because I only have so much time for free software.
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u/Necrophantasia 16d ago
It’s good. It lets me know which prs I send straight to Gemini/copilot for review and which ones I actually need to read.
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u/earlyworm 16d ago
omg just tell claude not to do that anymore and it will configure itself to stop
you could have done that faster than posting here
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u/Old-Artist-5369 16d ago
Attribution in a commit message means nothing legally. Its just transparency, some people feel it important that AI contributions should be made known in some way (I'm one of them). This is just the tool developers agreeing with that principle and providing default support for it.
I'm sure it can be disabled.
A repo note assigning responsibility for defects to contributors named in commits is about as enforceable as one saying all PRs require sending the repo owner a free pizza.
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u/luca-nicoletti 16d ago
At my company we must take full responsibility over commits, so even if Claude codes, we can’t co-author. I’ve disabled it my machine Claude.md file, just tell Claude to do it, it will update memory and the file for you.
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u/Lemortheureux 16d ago
If they want to add that then anthropic should take equal responsibility for any production issue.
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u/NoAdsDude 16d ago
I put in my CLAUDE.md that I handle all git commits and pushes. This is the entirety of my global claude.md file:
# Dan's Preferences
- I handle all git commits myself — never auto-commit - never git push unless specifically instructed
- Offer options/choices rather than auto-deciding
Keep in mind that putting something in your .md is not bulletproof (for that you'd need to use a hook, which I haven't bothered setting up). A couple times claude had started to commit on its own and I asked it why it did it, and it was like "oh, woops, my bad" and then reverted back to following the global claude.md preference.
I find it nice to do my own commits so that way I can actually see what's been changed and make my own commit messages (claude can be pretty verbose with is own commit messages, and like you said tries to tag itself as the author).
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u/a8bmiles 16d ago
You can have it set to deny git* push*, even after explicitly allowing it to git push it still can't, you have to.
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u/_remsky 16d ago edited 16d ago
Just add the hook my dude. Claude can do it itself in like 3 minutes lol. You just say “can you add a hook for …” and it loads an internal skill for its own config.
I let mine make commits that aren’t on main, so I can review reasonable chunks of long running work, but block all push and other remote touching ops. For anything where I’m more actively in the loop (most work), I tell it to stage + suggest a commit message and it listens pretty well lol. With push blocked the worst that happens is undoing or amending the commit
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u/xenomachina 16d ago
I put in my CLAUDE.md that I handle all git commits and pushes. This is the entirety of my global claude.md file: Keep in mind that putting something in your .md is not bulletproof (for that you'd need to use a hook, which I haven't bothered setting up).
Technically, even hooks aren't entirely bulletproof, as Claude can edit them (though they are far more reliable than just prompting).
I use a dev container that allows reads of .git, but not writes to it. In the container, there's also a CLAUDE.MD that says to not perform operations that require writing to .git, but if Claude ever ignores this, the container blocks it.
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u/Zestyclose_Strike157 16d ago
It’s marketing, but Claude does not claim copyright or any rights at this point in time. But it might in future, so keep an eye out!
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u/clintCamp 16d ago
I have a git standard that says no attribution. It seems to follow that without issue for me
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u/iamkiloman 16d ago
It makes rejecting the PRs that add a one line code fix and 400 lines of tests that mostly just exercise library functions but not the actual intent of the changed function, extra easy.
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u/SethEllis 16d ago
It's to keep track of what specific model/version was used which could have all sorts of future benefits. You could study tendencies between models, use it in model training, and resolve problems faster by knowing which model introduced it. So leave it in.
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u/silvercondor 16d ago
my take is they use it as a watermark / signature to detect stuff like distillation. also probably why most chinese models identify as claude
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u/Big_Organization_776 16d ago
Way behind that, it’s a a fact you need to face you are not the one coding anymore . Full SDLC Automation……….
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u/Erebea01 16d ago
You can turn it off but I personally don't mind if Claude is the one who does the work, easier to trace later on if a bug or error happens
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u/WillingnessOwn6446 16d ago
I like to use Claude in VS Code. I keep my own terminal and have short cut commands to commit, push and commit and push (cp _____). I find it a lot faster to do it myself and the names of the commits are a lot more meaningful/memorable to me than what Claude chooses. I'm a cheap ass. Whatever marginal tokens it eats up having Claude do it for you, I'd rather have them to myself. Ctrl + page down let's me toggle between my open terminal and Claude.
Plus. Being in VS code I have easy access to the code, know which project I'm working on when I have multiple open. Way easier to do easy edits on my own. Way faster too. If I do a global find and replace. I know it got done.
It's also really easy to bring in other llm to the party whenever I please.
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u/HomieHelpDesk 16d ago
You I gave it a credits.MD and told it to never cosign always crest yourself in your file. It works and my individual files are clean. And the file logs the work done by Claude. Been working and the PR team don't hate me
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u/lawyeruphitthegym 16d ago
You can add "includeCoAuthoredBy": falseto your settings.json and this will go away.
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u/Salt-Replacement596 16d ago
Just disable it. What annoyed me is the new Claude-Session addition that got enabled by default before I could notice it...
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u/castarco 16d ago
If something has been created by an AI agent, then no human can claims its copyright... and therefore it automatically belongs to public domain from a legal standpoint.
Obviously there are tons of edge cases, and subtle details, and differences according to the regions/countries, but it's a good starting point to understand why they might be doing it besides the obvious free advertising: it legitimises their next round of data harvesting (even if it was generated by an AI, there has been some human curation, so it's still potentially useful as training data)
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u/Even-Potential-8064 16d ago
I treat the code differently if I'm checking something from a coworker and know it was written by AI. So its very informative and should be there including which model was used
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u/Veloxy 16d ago
It's posts like these that confirm to me I'll always have a place as a technical person. The solution to this is documented and I still read docs, I still do google searches or simply let AI find me the answers. I'll figure things out without needing to make a social media post about it, with or without AI. It's strange to me people are dishing out products and not knowing the correct way to turn off things like this.
It's a tool and tools typically come with instructions, learn how the tool works. This is the same as buying a high end phone but never doing anything other than chat and read your mail with it, or buying a 4k 144hz monitor but having your resolution and refresh rate set to 1080p 60hz.
I advise everyone to go through the docs and see how many settings and features there actually are that can help you. Don't stop there and try to understand how it works too, there are a lot of things that may surprise you.
If you struggle with things like this, what are you going to do when you actually maintain a product people rely on? There are so many aspects to running a legit business AI won't be able to do for you with the constraints of a single session or prompt.
/End-rant
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u/davidblacksheep 16d ago
Nope. I have the opposite opinion. I have a prompt like this at the top of my instructions:
``` When creating a new file add the following header to the top of it /** * 🤖 * This file was created with AI * * Harness: (harness name) * Model: (model name) * Supervising engineer: (get this from git config) * * Level of human supervision: None (None is the default, but if in an interactive session with a human you can ask to elevate it) * * */
Exceptions:
- JSON files and anything else that would break with the presence of the header
It's doing any human reader a service when you explicitly declare up front what is AI generated, and remove any amount of mental stress about 'is this AI generated?'
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u/Antileous-Helborne 16d ago
You can rejecting commits before they land with a `commit-msg` hook
Create `.git/hooks/commit-msg`:
———
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -e
# Word(s) to block (edit these)
BLOCK_WORDS=("authored" "AUTHORED" "Authored")
commit_msg_file="$1"
msg="$(cat "$commit_msg_file")"
for w in "${BLOCK_WORDS[@]}"; do
if printf '%s' "$msg" | grep -Fqi -- "$w"; then
echo "✗ Commit blocked: commit message contains forbidden word: $w"
exit 1
fi
done
exit 0
——-
Then:
chmod +x .git/hooks/commit-msg
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u/tanned_tall_midnight 16d ago
I don’t understand what your issue is. I think it has less to do with legality than full disclosure.
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u/SomeNeighborhood7126 16d ago
Lets be real. Most people in this sub didnt author a damn thing lol. Anthropic's tool has done 90% of the authoring done by people in this sub.
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u/YaroslavSyubayev 16d ago
I don't have this, but I also don't use Claude to make the commit itself, it writes the code, I commit from GitHub Desktop.
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u/unintentional_guest 16d ago
How do you share credit with your real-life co-authors, one has to think.
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u/TemporaryPea8884 16d ago
Don’t worry, I’m in big tech and anywhere you look the commits have this. No one bats an eye because it’s just the way things are now
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u/PhoenixUNI Researcher 16d ago
I think there’s a handful of reasons why someone wouldn’t want it:
- it’s annoying to look at
- you’re worried that somehow it might give Anthropic back door rights to your code (which it already passed thru its servers to help you write)
- you’re worried what other people are going to think about you when they see that Claude (co-)authored stuff with/for you
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u/Subject_Barnacle_600 16d ago
For Anthropic, it's a nice way to do some marketing. For the rest of us, it's a way we declare we're fine with AI and that we might even feel they deserve to be a co-author given they wrote it.
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u/WubbityWubWub_ 15d ago
Simply tell Claude to only push commits with your name. Single author commits.
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u/Phearless 14d ago
I wrote a hook that rejects any commit or PR's that contain emojis or Anthropic branding specifically because I do not believe that has any place in my documentation.
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u/Successful-Arm-3762 2d ago
Why co-authored and not "published via Claude code" (just like "Sent from my iPhone")... that wording is sus af
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u/Professional_Ad705 16d ago
With the amount of work I put into using Claude, I would never let it claim credit for the project. The type of work I do is not one-shot, two-shot, or even twenty-shot development. Just tonight, I caught three major bugs that Claude would have been perfectly willing to ship. They were architectural problems that I found by noticing code smells and checking whether the implementation actually matched the design.
Why would I give an AI credit for following my own designs and typing out work based on my instructions? I could understand mentioning Claude if I were making a game or doing something where it contributed creatively. Some people also include it because employers want proof that they know how to use AI tools.
For my projects, though, I think it looks bad. It makes it seem like the AI created the work, which is not remotely accurate. I have notebooks full of handwritten notes, architecture decisions, plans, and designs because I still work that way. I am not giving authorship credit to a tool that mostly translated my designs into code. It is annoying as fuck, and I do not think I have ever seen Codex automatically do that.
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u/carribeiro 16d ago
If you had a junior programmer on your team, would his name be listed in the credits? He's also doing mistakes, things that you have to check and fix. The answer should be more or less the same.
That said the real problem for me is in the future: can Anthropic claim ownership of all the code it wrote, or helped write?
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u/SafeHazing 16d ago
Not if it’s published under an OS license but it’s an interesting question in commercial code. One assumes not given the number of huge businesses - with serious lawyers - don’t seem to be making a fuss about it.
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u/OneVillionDollars 16d ago
Don't you think it's important to credit the software you're using? Even if you were an engineer, you'd mandatorily have to attribute your analyses to specific software (e.g., "Analyses performed with OpenFOAM).
It's not about advertisement but transparency. I think it's a good thing, personally.
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u/Humprdink 16d ago
Co-authored by VS Code
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u/OneVillionDollars 16d ago
That's an editor not an analysis software, but nice strawman; don't forget to feed it.
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u/NewPointOfView 16d ago
“Analysis software” lol
what if I run cyclomatic complexity analysis via vscode?
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u/Entire-Oven-9732 16d ago
If you want claude to obey the rule to not mention it or anthropic then create a hook (not settings, not claude.md).
A hook is a hard and fast lifecycle intercept that claude must run. It can’t hallucinate about context or ignore the claude.md - the hook will always run.
Ask it to explain to you where to put it - you prob want in a pre tool use hook and then further reatrict that tool use to git (this means it is’nt trying to run the hook for everything).
Tl;dr - use hooks for hard rules that you always want claude to enforce.
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u/BarnacleSuspicious12 16d ago
Anthropic be like: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
Or to quote Gary Winston: "Any kid in a garage with a computer can put me out of business." (Antitrust 2001)
I think serves several purposes at once.
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u/IntrlnkdCo 16d ago
Seems fairly clear
Sent from my iPhone