Who owns code written with Claude Code? IP, copyright and contract points

Between you and Anthropic, you own what Claude Code produces for you. Anthropic's Commercial Terms (Team, Enterprise, API) say the customer "owns its Outputs," and both the commercial and consumer terms assign Anthropic's rights in outputs to the user, "if any." That last phrase is the catch. Anthropic's terms settle who holds whatever rights exist; they don't create copyright where the law doesn't recognize it. In the US, the Copyright Office's position is that AI output is protected "only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements," and prompts alone don't count.

For a business website, that usually matters less than it sounds, because a real site is a mix of human decisions, human edits, existing code and AI-written pieces. What matters more is the chain from Anthropic to whoever holds the account, and from them to you, plus the limits of Anthropic's IP indemnity. This guide lays those out as of October 2026. This is not legal advice. Copyright and contract law vary by country and change; if the code is central to your business, or you are buying or selling a company that depends on it, ask an intellectual property attorney.

What Anthropic's terms say about ownership

Claude Code is governed by Anthropic's standard terms: Commercial Terms "for Team, Enterprise, and Claude API users" and Consumer Terms "for Free, Pro, and Max users," per Anthropic's legal and compliance page. On ownership they are close:

Three points are easy to miss. The commercial ownership clause applies "As between the parties and to the extent permitted by applicable law," so it settles rights between you and Anthropic, only as far as the law allows, and doesn't decide anyone else's claims. The assignment is conditional on following the terms, including the Usage Policy. And "Outputs" means responses generated by the service; your existing code, which you send as input, stays yours either way.

Can AI-written code be copyrighted?

This is a question of law, not of Anthropic's terms. In the US, the Copyright Office's Part 2 report on copyrightability (January 29, 2025) concluded that "the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output, but not the mere provision of prompts." It also said "the use of AI to assist in the process of creation or the inclusion of AI-generated material in a larger human-generated work does not bar copyrightability."

What that means in practice for a website, in general terms that your attorney can refine:

• Your existing site remains yours. Code, copy and design that people wrote don't change status because Claude Code edited around them.
• Human selection, arrangement and editing count. A site where people decided the structure, reviewed and rewrote output, and combined it with their own work is in a different position from code generated in one prompt.
• Small, purely generated snippets may have thin or no protection. For most business sites, that is a minor risk; your competitive value is rarely a CSS file.
• Other countries take their own positions. Ask counsel where you or your customers are.

The Copyright Office has also issued registration guidance for works that contain AI-generated material. If you plan to register software or content, read it and get advice before filing.

Anthropic's IP indemnity: what it covers and what it doesn't

An indemnity is a promise to defend you, and pay certain costs, if someone sues. Section K.1 of the Commercial Terms says Anthropic will defend the customer against "a third-party claim, suit, or proceeding alleging that Customer's paid use of the Services (which includes data Anthropic has used to train a model that is part of the Services) in accordance with these Terms or Outputs generated through such authorized use violates any third-party intellectual property right."

Section K.3 then excludes claims that arise from:

1. "modifications made by Customer to the Services or Outputs"
2. "the combination of the Services or Outputs with technology or content not provided by Anthropic"
3. "Inputs or other data provided by Customer"
4. use the customer "knows or reasonably should know violates or infringes the rights of others"
5. "the practice of a patented invention contained in an Output"
6. "an alleged violation of trademark based on use of an Output in trade or commerce"

It also excludes claims arising from the indemnified party's "fraud, willful misconduct, violations of law, or breach of the Agreement." Read the exclusions against how websites are actually built. Nearly all website code is edited by people and combined with frameworks, themes, plugins and your own content, which are the situations exclusions (a) and (b) describe. The indemnity is real, but it is narrower than "Anthropic has you covered," and only applies to "paid use" under commercial terms. How it applies to a given claim is a question for counsel.

The Consumer Terms have no equivalent. Instead: "YOU AGREE TO INDEMNIFY AND HOLD HARMLESS THE ANTHROPIC PARTIES," and Anthropic's liability is capped at the greater of what you paid in the previous six months and $100. That is one more reason company work belongs on a commercial plan; the plans are compared in our guide to Claude Code pricing and plans.

Open-source code and third-party components

Claude Code can add packages, copy patterns from documentation, or write code that resembles common open-source snippets. Open-source licenses come with conditions, such as keeping notices or, for some licenses, sharing source code. Those obligations are yours whether a person or an AI added the component.

• Review new dependencies in every pull request, including their licenses.
• Keep a list of third-party components and licenses for the site, and update it at handover.
• Treat any non-trivial snippet that looks copied from a library or documentation as third-party code: find the original and check its license yourself.
• Don't paste code you don't have rights to into a session; inputs you provide are outside Anthropic's indemnity under exclusion (c).

Review rules like these belong in your team's AI code review policy.

When a vendor builds your site

Anthropic's terms run between Anthropic and the account holder. If your developer or agency uses its own Claude account, the vendor is the "Customer" who owns the outputs as against Anthropic. Your rights then come from your contract with the vendor. Points to settle, which our guide to contract terms for Claude Code work covers clause by clause:

The handover itself is covered in what you should receive at the end of a project. If the vendor uses seats on your own Team or Enterprise plan instead, you are the customer, which simplifies the chain. Deliverables and handover can also be written into the project scope; our scope-of-work template includes a handover checklist, and our guide to choosing a Claude Code agency lists questions to ask before you sign.

Keep a record of human work

Because human contribution matters to copyright, keep evidence of it as a matter of routine. Git history shows who committed what and when. Claude Code adds a Co-Authored-By trailer to commits by default, so AI-assisted commits are marked unless someone changes the attribution setting. Pull request reviews, design decisions, briefs and edited drafts all show human direction. None of this guarantees an outcome, but it is far easier to keep these records from the start than to reconstruct them later. The same habit helps with content, as our piece on AI-generated vs human-edited content explains.

Using Anthropic's names

A related IP point for agencies and software builders: Anthropic's legal page says you can state in plain text that a product "has Claude Code preinstalled or that it runs Claude Code," but "you can't use the Claude Code or Anthropic names or logos as part of your own product, feature, or company name, in your own logo, or in a way that suggests Anthropic built, endorses, or is partnered with your product." Check this before naming a service or tool.

Conclusion

As between you and Anthropic, you own Claude Code's output, on both commercial and consumer plans. Whether that output is protected by copyright depends on human contribution, and Anthropic's IP indemnity, available only on commercial plans, has exclusions that matter for how websites are built. Use a commercial plan for company work, keep the vendor-to-you chain clear in your contract, track third-party licenses, and keep records of human decisions. Then have an IP attorney review anything the business depends on. If you want a site built with that paper trail from day one, see our Claude Code development services. More guides are in our Claude Code Guide.

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