Ask HN: Software Licenses that prevent LLMs from training on open source?

8 points by mattm 1 day ago | 5 comments

I'm planning to release an open source software library soon and was wondering - are there any licenses that would prevent LLMs from ingesting it into their training? Do any of the labs say that they don't ingest software code that uses certain licenses?

I realize this would be something that would be nearly impossible to discover and they could always say that they don't but they end up ingesting anyway.

appenz 1 day ago |

IANAL and this is not legal advice, but to explain the issue further in a number of countries training is considered fair use. If someone training the model can find one country where this is the case (and there are no edge case issues from things like copying the data for training) training is legal. So far, the US hasn’t restricted importing models (which specifically for open source might not be possible due to free speech) so using that model in the US is legal as well.

And understood that there are strong opinions on both sides of the argument if this is good or bad.

linesofcode 1 day ago |

There’s nothing you can do to stop this. If your stuff is on the internet it will be crawled.

Don’t want the LLMs or anyone else to gobble up your project then keep it private.

The licenses are a gentleman’s agreement in a world of no gentlemen.

wmf 1 day ago |

There probably can't be. I assume they don't even look at the license when they crawl.

sigbottle 1 day ago |

Chivalry and honor. Fight them to a duel to the death on horseback and javelin jousting.

brudgers 1 day ago |

Unless your license is backed up by the legal wherewithal to enforce its terms, your choice doesn't matter.

There are is no Software License Enforcement Agency.

And by "legal wherewithal" I mean enough money to out lawyer the big AI companies who have many billions of dollars on the line and therefore a few billion for legal fees.

Also keep in mind that scraping by open-source projects is a proven tactic for corporate ingestion while generating plausible legal protection.

Good luck.