AI Collapses the Economic Moat of Clean-Room Reimplementation

The copyleft moat was never purely legal. It was economic: compliance was cheaper than reimplementation. AI collapsed that cost. Clean-room reimplementation has been legal since Sega v. Accolade (1992), but nobody rewrites Redis to avoid the AGPL when the rewrite takes months of expert labor. AI changed the calculus. Dan Blanchard rewrote the Python chardet library with Claude Code in days. MALUS.sh launched as “clean room as a service”: feed it any open source project, get a functionally equivalent clone stripped of license obligations. Whether AI-mediated clean rooms satisfy traditional doctrine (which required no access to original source) is untested law. But enforcement at scale is impossible regardless. The economic bulwark is gone irrespective of the legal outcome.