it's well known that recipes cannot be copyrighted. But recipes still are protected intellectual property by trade secret law if they are treated as a secret by the holder of the recipe.
Claude code itself is a trade secret, and it is not open source, so its own copyrightability is moot till you get your hands on a copy of it with clean hands.
Recipes cannot be copyrighted because they are not expressions of human creativity. Software written by AIs are also not expressions of human creativity, so the balance is tilted in favor of AI generated copy not being copyrightable.
The Supreme Court or legislation could change this, and I'd guess there will be a movement to go in that direction, but till something like that succeeded it's not so.
> Software written by AIs are also not expressions of human creativity
I mean I'm not the biggest fan of AI on the planet by any means (which I think my post history would prove, lol), but isn't prompt design and steering the AI "human creativity"? In one of my AI-assisted projects I spent like a week in unending threads of posts trying to make the AI do stuff the way I wanted, testing the output, finding a bazillion of bugs and "basic bitch" solutions, asking for more robust this and edge case that. It felt like I wrote a novel. How is that not creativity (Crayon-eater or Picasso, creativity is creativity)?
> But recipes still are protected intellectual property by trade secret law if they are treated as a secret by the holder of the recipe.
Trade secrets aren't very well protected, though.
You can sue the person who leaked/stole your secret, but if others keep sharing it once it is leaked you can do nothing to them.