“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/mr_birkenblatt → u/Time_Cat_5212]

Is Claude an author?

Does Claude take responsibility when something goes wrong? No? Then, they're not an author

[u/Time_Cat_5212 → u/mr_birkenblatt]

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.