Who owns the code when a development partner or an AI writes it

Investors in the next round, and any later buyer of the company, will check that the company owns its code. Two facts make that question harder for an AI startup. Some of the code may be written by people outside the company, such as a development firm or a freelancer. And some of it may be written by an AI model. This page explains what US copyright law and the US Copyright Office say about each case, with the sources. It is general information, and a lawyer should draft and review your contracts. It is part of the guide on building your AI product after you raise.

Rule one: copyright starts with the author

Copyright is the legal right to copy and sell a creative work, such as written code. The starting rule is in 17 U.S.C. section 201(a): "Copyright in a work protected under this title vests initially in the author or authors of the work" [5]. "Vests initially" means the right belongs to the author first.

There is one important exception, the work made for hire. Section 201(b) says: "In the case of a work made for hire, the employer or other person for whom the work was prepared is considered the author for purposes of this title" [5]. So for a work made for hire, the company is the author from the start, and no transfer is needed.

Rule two: employees and contractors are treated differently

Section 101 of the same title defines a work made for hire in two ways [4]. The first is "a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment". Code that an employee writes as part of the job is a work made for hire, and the company owns it.

The second covers commissioned work, which is work ordered from someone outside the company. It counts as a work made for hire only if it falls into one of nine listed categories, and only "if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire" [4]. The nine categories are a contribution to a collective work, part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, a translation, a supplementary work, a compilation, an instructional text, a test, answer material for a test, and an atlas. Computer programs are not named in that list.

The Copyright Office's Circular 30, revised in August 2024, makes the test strict. It says a commissioned work is a work made for hire only "if it satisfies all of the following four criteria", and "If a work fails to satisfy any of these requirements, it is not a work made for hire" [7]. It also says the question "is determined by facts in existence at the time the work is created" [7]. Sign the agreement before the work starts, and ask a lawyer about code written before it.

Rule three: a transfer must be in writing and signed

When the company is not the author, it needs the author to transfer the copyright. Section 204(a) sets the form: "A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner's duly authorized agent" [6]. An instrument of conveyance is a document that transfers ownership, often called an assignment.

For code from a contractor or a development firm, you therefore need a written, signed assignment of the copyright to your company. A lawyer should draft the agreement, and it should cover code already written as well as code to come.

Who wrote the code	Who owns the copyright at first	What the company needs
An employee, within the job	The company, as a work made for hire [4] [5]	An employment agreement that says so clearly
A contractor or a development firm	The contractor, as author [5]	A written, signed assignment to the company [6]
A founder before the company existed	The founder, as author [5]	A written, signed assignment to the company [6]
An AI model, with no human creative control	No one: purely AI-generated material is not protected [1]	Creative selection, arrangement or changes by people, which the law can protect [1]
A person working with AI tools	The person, for the human expression in it [1]	The same employment or assignment paperwork as above

What the Copyright Office says about AI-written material

The US Copyright Office published Part 2 of its report on copyright and artificial intelligence in January 2025. Its main conclusions, in its own words [1]:

• "Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements."
• "The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output."
• "Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material."
• "Based on the functioning of current generally available technology, prompts do not alone provide sufficient control."
• "Human authors are entitled to copyright in their works of authorship that are perceptible in AI-generated outputs, as well as the creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of material in the outputs, or creative modifications of the outputs."
• "Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis."

The Office concluded that these questions "can be resolved pursuant to existing law, without the need for legislative change" [1]. It also said the answer could change: "There may come a time when prompts can sufficiently control expressive elements in AI-generated outputs to reflect human authorship" [1].

For a startup, the report means this. Code that an AI model writes from a prompt, with no human creative choices, is purely AI-generated material, which the Office says copyright does not protect. Code in which people make the creative choices, by selecting, arranging and changing what the model produced, or by writing parts themselves, can carry human expression that copyright protects, and the Office says each case is decided on its facts. Keep records that show those human choices: the specification, the design decisions, the review comments and the changes people made.

The Thaler decision

The courts have applied the same rule. In Thaler v. Perlmutter, decided on March 18, 2025, the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that an AI system called the Creativity Machine "cannot be the recognized author of a copyrighted work because the Copyright Act of 1976 requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being" [2]. The court added that "the human authorship requirement does not prohibit copyrighting work that was made by or with the assistance of artificial intelligence" [2].

Stephen Thaler asked the Supreme Court to review the case. Its docket for case 25-449 records, on March 2, 2026: "Petition DENIED" [3]. The appeals court ruling stands.

Outside the United States

Other countries have their own rules. The UK's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has a rule for computer-generated works: "the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken" [9]. The Copyright Office's report summarises two other positions [1]. It says EU member states, answering a 2024 questionnaire, shared the view that AI-generated content may be eligible for copyright "only if the human input in [the] creative process was significant." It says Japan's guidelines of May 2024 decide the question case by case. This guide read only the Copyright Office's summary of those two, and did not open the EU or Japanese documents. If you sell in those countries, ask a local lawyer.

The model provider's terms

Providers also write terms about who owns the output. Anthropic's commercial terms, effective June 17, 2025, say: "Subject to Customer's compliance with these Terms, Anthropic hereby assigns to Customer its right, title and interest (if any) in and to Outputs" [8]. The words "if any" matter. The terms pass to you whatever rights Anthropic has, and they cannot create a copyright that the law does not give. This guide could not open OpenAI's services agreement, so it does not describe OpenAI's terms on outputs.

Open-source code is part of ownership too

Your codebase also contains code that nobody at the company wrote: open-source libraries, published under licences with conditions. Lawyers at Morgan Lewis, writing in June 2026 about due diligence for a company sale, list "a review of the company's practices relating to the use of software licensed under copyleft licenses, such as the GNU General Public License (GPL), Affero General Public License (AGPL), Lesser GPL (LGPL), and similar licenses" among the checks [10]. A copyleft licence can require a company that distributes the code to publish its own changes under the same licence. Run a licence scan on all the code, whoever or whatever wrote it, as well as keeping your assignments. The page code provenance and licence exposure in AI-generated code covers what investors check.

What to put in writing with a development partner

Ask a lawyer to draft the agreement. The points to raise with them:

1. An assignment that transfers to your company, from the day it is signed, the copyright in all code, documents and tests the partner writes for you, signed by the partner.
2. The same assignment for any freelancer or subcontractor the partner uses.
3. A statement of how the partner uses AI tools, and records of the human review and changes, so that you can show the human expression in the code.
4. A list of open-source components with their licences, delivered with the code.
5. Delivery of the eval suite, the specification and the prompts as well as the code, so that you own everything needed to change the product later.

The page what investors expect before the next round shows where these records go in a data room.

Where Reveneau fits

Reveneau is an AI software development consultancy with offices in San Francisco and Vancouver. Reveneau says AI writes all of its code and every change must pass an eval suite written from the specification, which Jev, TypeSafe AI's decision model, grades. It says it takes responsibility for the whole project through production and after release. Ask any partner, Reveneau included, to put the assignment of copyright, the handover of the eval suite and the open-source list into the contract. To discuss a build, see AI development at Reveneau or contact Reveneau. The page an AI development partner for a startup compares the kinds of firm a startup can hire.