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Former Coinbase employee accused of ‘stealing’ code for PearAI
Headline, former Coinbase employee accused of "stealing code" for pair AI, published at 4.14 PM, September 30, 2024, on Protos.com. A former Coinbase employee has been accused of "stealing code" and using chat GPT to illegally change the licensing of another open-source AI coding firm to create pair AI. Matthew Duke Pan, known as "frying pan", claims to have made $270,000 a year working for the crypto exchange before quitting to make pair AI. Last Friday, Pan announced the AI firm had secured $500,000 in funding from the startup accelerator program "Y Combinator" like YC. However, after Pan promoted pair AI at the YC event on X, formerly Twitter, users criticized the firm for "stealing the code of fellow open-source AI code editor, continue.dev", and passing it off as its own. Someone also claimed they illegally "relasensed pair AI to an enterprise license". In response, Pan said, "Dog, I chat GTP'd the license". He added that he would change the license if there was a problem and claimed "We busy building RN can't be bothered with legal". The founder of YC, Gary Tan, responded to the backlash by defending Pan. He repeatedly noted that "continue used an open-source Apache license" and that he didn't understand why people are dragging a new project. However, the conversion of "continues Apache licensing to enterprise" was repeatedly called out for its illegality, and Tan has since changed his stance, noting that the "relasensing" was "clearly a mistake" and that it has been fixed now. Pan's ex post received a community note over this period that said "Pair AI mass replaced all references of "continue to pair AI" and used its code". But this note was taken down and for the past 24 hours, Pan has been out on damage control. He called the note "objectively false" and claimed "We are way too open and honest for this slander". Pan noted that "Pair AI's GitHub about section" states it is a fork of VS code and "continue" and claims that he has publicly credited "continue" for months on GitHub and in various YouTube videos. Protos has reached out to frying Pan for comment. This recording was "AI-generated". Get more crypto news at protos.com.