MIT NON-AI License
Copyright (c) 2025-2026 NAME
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
1. The Software and any derivative works may not be used for the purposes of training, fine-tuning, or validating artificial intelligence models or machine learning algorithms without prior written permission from the copyright holders.
2. The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
No-you-still-dont-have-to-pay-but-any-AI-use-is-restricted-license. 1 This way, everyone knows, its not as free as the MIT license and has absolutely no relation to it. /s
Ofcourse you can specialize existing licenses with limited paragraphs and reflect that in their names...
Key words are:
- permission is [...] granted
- free of charge
- without restriction
- use, copy, …
> may not be used for the purposes of […]
The license contradicts itself.
> Don't we have to ask for permission before feeding someone's years of work into an AI?
That's the point of an OpenSource license, to give permission.
This kind of stuff makes me think very few people really understand what OpenSource is about. The very same people who will fallback to licenses such as the BSL as soon as people/companies will use the permissions that they gave, and then will complain that "no one wants to pay for the thing i did for free and nobody asked for".
What we have to focus is why we created free software, not word by word terms that not fulfill the requirement at this and future time period.
OpenSource projects are not becoming free training material for AI, AI companies are using a freedom OpenSource projects granted.
The claim that AI can build far superior software is dubious and I don't believe it one second. And even if it were true, that does not change anything.
With or without AI, permissive licenses (MIT, BSD, ISC, ...) always allowed the code to be used and redistributed in non opensource software. If you don't want that, use the GPL or a derive. If you don't believe that the GPL would be enforceable on the derivative works produced by AI, don't release your code as opensource.
OpenSource is essentially an ideology, that software should be free of use, and transparent, and freely shareable, without restriction. If you don't buy into that ideology, it's fine, but don't claim to love OpenSource when you don't. Just like a person who eats fish should not claim to be vegan.
AI will not be the end of OpenSource, firstly because it's a dead-end technology, it has already peaked years ago and is becoming worse with each new model. It does not have the ability to build complex software beyond a CRUD app (would you use a kernel that was entirely vibecoded? would you trust it the way you trust the Linux kernel?). Secondly, because OpenSource does not discriminate who gets to enjoy the freedom you granted.
You decided to "work for free" when you decided to distribute as OpenSource. If you don't want to work for free, maybe OpenSource is not for you.
Also, this "non-AI" license is plainly not open source nor is it permissive. You can't really say you are a fan of open source when you use a license like this. The whole pt of the MIT license is that you just take it with no strings attached. You can use the software for good or for evil. It's not the license's job to decide.
There is nothing wrong with not liking open source, btw. The largest tech companies in the world all have their most critical software behind closed doors. I just really dislike it when people engage in double-speak and go on this open source clout chasing. This is also why all these hipsters startups (MongoDB, Redis, etc) all ended up enshittifying their open source products IMO, because culturally we are all trying to chase this "we ♥ open source" meme without thinking whether it makes sense.
If people say they "truly love open source", they should mean it.
Providers of GPAI models must respect Text and Data Mining (TDM) opt-outs.
2.1 Legal Basis: Article 53(1)(c) AI Act and Directive (EU) 2019/790 The Copyright Chapter of the Code directly addresses one of the most contentious legal questions in AI governance: the use of copyrighted material in training GPAI models and the risk of infringing outputs. Article 53(1)(c) AI Act requires GPAI providers to “identify and respect copyright protection and rights reservations” within their datasets. + This obligation complements the framework of Directive (EU) 2019/790 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market (DSM Directive). Notably, Article 4(3) DSM Directive allows rightsholders to exclude their works from text and data mining (TDM) operations via machine-readable opt-outs.
https://www.ddg.fr/actualite/the-european-unions-code-of-pra...
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2025/7740...
Two relevant bits, dug out from the 175-page whole:
> Although the Act tries to address this by extending obligations to any provider placing a GPAI model on the EU market, the extraterritorial enforcement of these obligations remains highly uncertain due to the territorial nature of copyright law and the practical difficulty of pursuing infringement claims when training occurs under foreign legal standards, such as U.S. fair use.
and:
> Finally, it is important to clarify that the current EU framework provides a closed list of exceptions and does not recognise a general fair use defence. As a result, AI-generated outputs that include protected expression without a valid exception remain unlawful.
It seems to be dated the same month as DDG's analysis, July 2025, so I would expect the MIT Non-AI License that we're discussing here to be much more defensible in the EU than in the U.S. — as long as one studies that full 175-page "Generative AI and Copyright" analysis and ensures that it addresses the salient points necessary to apply and enforce in EU copyright terms. (Queued for my someday-future :)
It’s midnight now, so you’re on your own to dig up and review specific instances of relevant case law, or to contrast with non-U.S. laws. Licensing above refers to i.e. LICENSE files of the specific sort that this post is about ("MIT Non-AI License"); other definitions of licensing, as well as e.g. DMCA exceptions, exist that might be of interest for you to explore further. I believe there’s been a handful of cases related to AI and fair use this past year, but as with all such defenses, unique circumstances are common enough that I hesitate to suggest any future outcome as 100% certain without much more case law than AI has today. (I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
But can I give you another "viewpoint"? I guess it's like, "Wow, my code, my work, what came from my brain, my fingers" - it essentially lives forever, if you think about it - it becomes embedded and compressed inside weights/tokens. Like - part of you is there.
I guess it's cool. For me it's just to know that like this super intelligent things deep down actually knows who I am - my code is in it's architecture, it gives me feeling of honor in some way. You know?
Just my take.
You deserve to be recognized beyond the false religion of the singularity.
Literature
Without references and citations—- never mind.
Go read Animal Farm
If you want to release your code as actual open source but legally restrict what AI companies do with it, use a copyleft license like the GPL. They could still use it for training, but the product of such training may itself fall under the GPL being a derivative work, and the AI corps don't want to touch that legal quagmire. (The GPL continues to be Stallman's brilliant legal aikido at work. Stallman is like that one guy from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance who gives you the power to manipulate the laws to work to your advantage.)
Honestly, it may be time to abandon open source as a concept. There are source-available strategies that cause less social harm than open source, including Coraline Ada Ehmke's "ethical source" and the Sentry project's "fair source" (https://fair.io) models that we can draw inspiration from.
- VC funded SF startups with an ethos of "Do whatever is necessary at first, scale then lawyer up once a unicorn and shits starts to hit the fan" this might try to prevent... and who will blissfully ignore it
- actually mindful actors, e.g public researchers, non-profit, etc who genuinely understand the point and will respect it but whom, ironically enough, you might want to support by providing them with more resources including your code
So... yes the intent is good but honestly I wouldn't trust the 1st category of actors to respect that. Technically what they "should" do, because it's safe and efficient, is only crawl the most popular compatible licenses, e.g. MIT, and ignore the rest. That's safe and pragmatic. Again what I expect them to do (just my hunch) is take EVERYTHING, get called on, apologize, change nothing, get brought to court, apologize again and only do something if the financial repercussion is bigger than the expected alternative. So probably still do nothing.
We should move to local LLMs.
Related, would you be in violation if you hosted this in a public GitHub repo, since it's in the TOS that they use source for training AI?
https://www.ddg.fr/actualite/the-european-unions-code-of-pra...