If the trained LLM spits out large, recognizable portions of licensed code and you use it in your product don’t count on that case to keep you from defending yourself in court. The court found in Bartz v. Anthropic that training was fair use. They also found that pirating content to train against was not fair use, and Anthropic paid $1,500,000,000 in a settlement.

There are licenses on most software source code. If you redistribute works derived from that code, you must abide by those licenses or you are violating the copyright. That’s what’s meant by “piracy" here.

Now if you have an LLM that has trained on code and learned to actually write new software, only small snippets too short to be protected by copyright should be identical between the training material and the output. However, if you’re getting output that is substantial in size and recognizably derivative from the original that’s an issue that hasn’t yet as far as I’m aware been settled in court. One would hope the major player LLMs don’t copy and paste large functional chunks of existing programs.

It would certainly seem to me that the code you sell after using an LLM should meet the same standards for difference in implementation as if it was written by a human. That should apply to both copyright protection and patent protection.