With two “agent” coding tools (in the battle between Anthropic’s Claude Code and Openai’s Codex CLI), the latter appears to promote more developer goodwill than the former. At least in part, because humanity has issued a Takedown notification to developers trying to reverse Claude code under a more restrictive use license than the Codex CLI.
Claude Code and Codex CLI are dueling tools that accomplish many of the same thing. It allows developers to leverage the power of AI models running in the cloud to complete a variety of coding tasks. Humanity and Openai released them within months of each other. Each company is competing to win valuable developer Mindshare.
Codex CLI source code is available under the Apache 2.0 license, which allows for distribution and commercial use. This is in contrast to the Claude Code, which is associated with human commercial licenses. This limits the ways in which you can change without express permission from the company.
Humanity has also “obfuscated” the source code of Claude code. In other words, the source code for Claude Code is not available immediately. When the developer removed it on Github and released the source code, Anthropic filed a DMCA complaint. This is a copyright notice requesting that the code be removed.
Social media developers were not happy with the move. A week or so after the release of Codex CLI, Openai merged numerous developer suggestions into the tool’s codebase, including one that allows Codex CLI to tap on AI models from rival providers, including humanity.
Humanity did not respond to requests for comment. To be fair to the lab, Claude Code is still in beta (and a bit of a buggy). Humanity may release source code in the future under a tolerant license. Companies have many reasons to obfuscate their code, and security considerations are one.
It’s a somewhat surprising PR victory for Openai, and has moved away from open source releases in recent months in favor of its own lockdown products. It may represent a broader change in the lab approach. Openai CEO Sam Altman said earlier this year that when it comes to open source, he believes the company is on the “wrong side of history.”
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