Codeberg Bans LLM-Generated Code Projects in New Terms of Use

Germany copyright law feels like the relevant thing here - Codeberg is a non-profit based in Germany.

Best quick English language overview of status that I could find:

https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2026/germany/when-can-a...

It looks like Codeberg want only copyrighted material in their service, so it is reliable in the future that e.g. licenses must be followed (e.g. GPL), and copyright doesn't suddenly get declared as being of the model owner, and it isn't a copy of something else.

That is a cautious reasonable position - in early days of LLM coding (3 years ago!) indemnity from model companies was a major issue globally because of the lack of clarity of the law around this. The US specifically has settled on it being (effectively?) public domain. But I don't think that is fully settled, and it certainly isn't settled in international copyright law.

The goal of the vague "mostly" in the Codeberg change is to ensure there is enough human input to the code they host, to be reasonably sure under German copyright law it is copyright of the person sharing it.

This is good and I am saying this as someone using coding agents full on.

I am a software engineer and I do use coding agents and I do believe that there can be spaces which do not encourage or allow projects built by generative AI.

Detection may become harder as time passes by but that aside, I think the massive generation abilities of multiple LLM providers will simply make it tough for code hosts. But it is also a choice - there should be spaces where people post projects that they actually write by hand (or with minimal assistance of agents).

I am personally and professionally very much on the "generate code" side of the situation simply because I can deliver things faster. But I know that LLMs are basically large word prediction systems that have been built on existing knowledge. They remix very well but I do not think they create brand new algorithms. For someone like me who is focused solely on building ramen-profitable products or services, LLMs are great but I know that I am not going to spend time/effort in any new research. I am not saying that every hand-written project is going to innovate but we should encourage spaces to maintain the barrier, else we may even become complacent.

They are a non-profit with a mission to support free software:

https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/en/bylaws....

However, they do this because of copyright status and harmful code:

"7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5). "

It would be cool if they just admitted that this is ideologically motivated rather than hide behind pragmatic excuses.

1) "unclear copyright status"

Even if the copyright concern was legitimate (highly doubt so), Codeberg would be fully protected under safe harbor laws.

2) "little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code"

Inclusion of harmful code is no more likely than human-extruded code (probably less actually).

I moderate r/selfhosted and we tried to enforce this rule almost 1:1, so let me predict on how this is going to go based on my experience.

1. You try to ban low quality vibe-coded projects, but try to not ban high quality projects that made use of AI. The goal is to send a message on what you deem acceptable.

2. Anyone creating what you deem a low quality vibe-coded project sees their project as belong to the second kind of project and therefore insists that their project is allowed. So how do you make sure what category a project belongs to? You might use scripts to identify classic trades of vibe-coded projects, look at the users history, etc. None of that is going to be bulletproof though and it is a lot of work.

3. You stop trying to enforce this rule as it is a "fight" you can't win and dealing with this takes more effort than dealing with the issues the low quality vibe-coded projects caused in the first place.

We ended up settling on restricting new projects instead as the majority of projects that fall into the first category don't last long. So step 4 would be to introduce some other kind of proxy for this kind of project that can actually be enforced.

Surprising to find a comment thread full of vibe coders being extremely defensive.

They are free to limit what they allow in their service and we are free to host our own code:

- Forgejo: https://forgejo.org/

- Gitea: https://gitea.com/

- GitLab Community Edition: https://about.gitlab.com/

- OneDev: https://onedev.io/

- Gogs: https://gogs.io/

- Sourcehut: https://sourcehut.org/

- GitBucket: https://gitbucket.github.io/