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ARTICLE · 14 APRIL 2026

Can AI Legally Clone Open Source? Unpacking "Clean Room As A Service"

Marks & Clerk
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Recently, a project called "MALUS" went viral in the software development community. By pointing an AI agent at the content of an Open Source project, MALUS claimed to produce analogous...

United KingdomIntellectual Property
Jeremy Russ
Jeremy Russ
Mike Williams
Mike Williams
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Recently, a project called "MALUS" went viral in the software development community. By pointing an AI agent at the content of an Open Source project, MALUS claimed to produce analogous software that bypasses the commercial restrictions of “copyleft” copyright licences (like GPL or LGPL) by ensuring that the original source code is never actually copied. MALUS purportedly achieves this via a “Clean Room as a Service”.

To understand why this is a problem, we need to understand some history. Back in the 1980s, IBM dominated the PC market, largely because they held the copyright to their proprietary BIOS. Competitors like Compaq wanted to build IBM-compatible clones but couldn't legally copy the BIOS code.

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