I had a friend of mine ask me today how he could protect his personal website which he completely let AI build, including all the text, from being copied by others. I rolled my eyes so hard I can still feel it. Told him not to worry about it.
The short answer: Legally, maybe. Ethically, no.
Ethically, no.
Sam Altman: Hold my beer.
I don’t know, Unlicense is still an OSS license, and imo that’s what vibe code should mostly be.
It’s absolutely ethical to ignore copyrights.
The absolute irony of wanting to copyright code using copyright-infringing LLMs.
It is not copyrightable. This is already settled law.
It’s a little more complicated than how you’re making it out to be and it’s also going to depend on where you live.
TL/DR: It can be copyrightable as a whole, but the output of a single prompt is not likely copyrightable.
The U.S. Copyright Office put together a report in 2025 on how AI is being handled in the U.S. as well as in other parts of the world.
See Section II - F: “Modifying or Arranging AI-Generated Content”
Generating content with AI is often an initial or intermediate step, and human authorship may be added in the final product. As explained in the AI Registration Guidance, “a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that ‘the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.’”¹²⁶ A human may also “modify material originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection.”¹²⁷
As several commenters noted, human authors should be able to claim copyright if they select, coordinate, and arrange AI-generated material in a creative way.¹²⁸ This would provide protection for the output as a whole (although not the AI-generated material alone).¹²⁹ A relatively common scenario in registration applications is the combination of human-authored text with AI-generated images. In one early case, for instance, the Office found that the selection and arrangement of AI-generated images with human-authored text in a comic book were protectable as a compilation.
Then if you skip to the conclusion of the report:
As described above, in many circumstances these outputs will be copyrightable in whole or in part—where AI is used as a tool, and where a human has been able to determine the expressive elements they contain. Prompts alone, however, at this stage are unlikely to satisfy those requirements.
If you’re curious where your country falls on the spectrum, see Section III - International Approaches.
Edit: added TL/DR.
Trust Me vs. Bro (2026)
Only works created by humans can be copyrighted. This was borne out when it was determined that a photo a … monkey? Ape? One of those, took of itself by accident could not have copyright because a person wasn’t involved in the creation of the image.
So far, the same has been ruled for works created by GenAI. See all the artworks out there that people were mad about not being able to get copyrighted.
edit: Also see this article. https://www.wordsbywes.ink/articles/tools/llm-generated-text-still-cant-be-copyrighted/
This article is from the Free Software Foundation Europe. It does mention US law and how they and other countries require a natural person to create the work, but also that e.g. Ireland and the UK do not.
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It also doesn’t really define ‘vibe code’ the way that it is generally understood by developers. Lots of devs use LLMs to do the busywork parts of development without actually vibe coding. It’s when you don’t understand what your code does that it becomes ‘vibe code’ - i.e. you’re relying on the vibes rather than understanding the code itself to determine if it’s good enough. Under that definition, where the prompt typically isn’t detailed enough to be considered a significant creative work and the person doing the prompting not only does not - but cannot - understand what it is doing, vibe code is NOT copyrightable, full stop.
If it gets included in a larger work that doesn’t fit that definition, then sure, the whole is copyrightable, but then it’s just chunks of vibe code, not a vibe coded product - and the contribution in the form of a pull request is not. It is public domain.
RTFA
