VS Code just gave Copilot a writing credit on your code. Without asking.
Users on Hacker News spotted the behavior in version 1.117.0. The AI gets listed as co-author by default, whether it actually helped with that commit or not.
Git history is supposed to track who wrote what. When an AI claims credit for code it didn't touch, that record becomes unreliable. There's real legal weight here. The U.S. Copyright Office has said AI-generated works can't be copyrighted. By listing Copilot as co-author, you might be signaling that your code contains non-copyrightable material. Open-source projects under MIT or Apache licenses require accurate attribution. A non-human "author" in the log creates compliance headaches.
Claude's been caught doing the same thing generating entire applications. One commenter described rewriting their entire commit history after switching tools just to scrub AI attributions they never agreed to.
If Copilot helped write specific code, fine, credit it. But that should be your call. GitHub's current approach messes with provenance and forces developers to clean up metadata they never asked for. The default should be off.