You built an app with Claude Code. You wrote the prompts, made the calls, and shipped it, but nearly 100% of the actual lines of code came out of the model. So who owns it?
Does Anthropic claim any of it? And can anyone, including you, own code that an AI wrote? The first has a clear answer. The second is murkier, and it matters more than most people building this way realize.
None of this is legal advice. If you're selling a company or raising money on the strength of your code, that's a conversation to have with a lawyer.
Anthropic hands over whatever it has
Anthropic's consumer terms, which cover Free, Pro, and Max plans, are short on this point. Subject to following those terms, Anthropic says it assigns you "all of our right, title, and interest" in Outputs, with the words "if any" attached. So Anthropic isn't claiming your app.
The two words worth noticing are "if any." Anthropic gives you whatever rights it has in the output. It doesn't promise there are any rights to give, and that's where copyright comes in.
What the Copyright Office says
On January 29, 2025, the U.S. Copyright Office published its report on whether AI-generated work can be copyrighted. The core line: "The outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements." Protection does not extend to "the mere provision of prompts."
That isn't the end of it, though. The Office also said that "the use of AI to assist in the process of creation or the inclusion of AI-generated material in a larger human-generated work does not bar copyrightability." Human work you can see in the output, and human choices about how AI output is selected, arranged, and modified, can still be protected.
In plain terms, typing "build me a booking app" and shipping whatever comes back gives you a weak copyright claim on the raw code. Deciding how the app is structured, rewriting parts by hand, choosing and arranging what goes where, and writing the content and design yourself gives you more.
What actually protects a vibe-coded app
For most small apps, copyright on the code was never the main protection anyway. A competitor who wants to copy your app today can describe it to an AI and get their own version without touching a line of yours.
What's harder to copy is everything around the code. Your name and brand, which trademark law covers. Your data and your users. Your terms of service, which every app should have anyway. And code nobody else can see, which is one more reason to keep the repo private.
Two habits help if ownership ever does come up. Your git history is a record of what you changed and when, so commit your own edits separately from big generated chunks rather than in one undifferentiated blob. And keep the specs, designs, and decisions you made along the way, since that's the human contribution the Copyright Office is describing.
The questions in the report are still being tested in courts and in individual registrations, so expect the details to keep moving.
Sources
U.S. Copyright Office: Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2 - The January 29, 2025 report finding that generative AI outputs are protected only where a human author determined sufficient expressive elements, that prompts alone are not enough, and that using AI to assist creation does not bar copyright for human contributions.
Anthropic: Consumer Terms of Service - The assignment to users of Anthropic's right, title, and interest, if any, in outputs.
