Chardet Maintainers Relicense Code Using AI

The maintainers of chardet, a Python character encoding detector used by requests and others, used Anthropic's Claude Code to rewrite the entire codebase and on March 5, 2026 released v7.0.0, relicensing the project from the LGPL to MIT. Original author a2mark alleges this bypassed a clean-room requirement and could violate the LGPL, while a March 2, 2026 U.S. Supreme Court decision left unresolved copyright questions for AI-generated code.