The Maintainer Used AI to Kill His Open Source License. It Took Five Days.
The creator deleted himself from the internet in 2011. AI rewrote his code in five days. He broke his silence to fight back.
The creator deleted himself from the internet in 2011. AI rewrote his code in five days. He broke his silence to fight back.
854 million downloads in a single year. Five days of Claude Code.
That is all it took to strip twenty years of copyleft protection from chardet, the Python character encoding library that sits inside nearly every Python environment on Earth.
Just before everything else, let's clarify two important license types that will dominate this article: LGPL says, "you can use this code, but if you change it, you must share your changes under the same terms." MIT says, "Do whatever you want." One protects the community. The other lets corporations take without giving back.
On March 2, 2026, Dan Blanchard released chardet 7.0.0. He called it a "ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite." The LGPL license that had protected the library since 2006 was gone. Replaced by MIT. The tool that performed the rewrite: Anthropic's Claude Code, running Opus 4.6.
Two days later, Mark Pilgrim came back. Pilgrim created chardet in 2006. In 2011, he deleted every trace of his online existence. The internet calls it his "infosuicide." Fifteen years of silence. His first public post in over a decade was GitHub Issue #327: "No right to relicense this project."
1,468 people agreed with him. The issue is now locked.
If you write Python, you almost certainly depend on chardet. And the legal fight over its license could determine whether copyleft means anything in the age of AI.
