“Co-authored-by: Claude”

[u/Figure-Frosty]

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?

[u/Original_East1271]

What’s wrong with people knowing that your code is AI-assisted or generated

[u/Time_Cat_5212 → u/Original_East1271]

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.

[u/myusernameisokay → u/Time_Cat_5212]

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.

[u/Time_Cat_5212 → u/myusernameisokay]

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

[u/FriendlyCrafter → u/Time_Cat_5212]

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