A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on September 16, 2026 affirmed the dismissal of a Digital Millennium Copyright Act claim brought by anonymous programmers against GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI, holding that the AI coding tools Copilot and Codex generate new works rather than stripping attribution from existing ones. The opinion arrived 15 days after the Department of Justice told a New York federal court that training large language models on copyrighted text is fair use. The case is Doe v. GitHub, Inc., docket number 24-7700, on appeal from the Northern District of California, where District Judge Jon S. Tigar presided under docket 4:22-cv-06823-JST. Circuit Judges Sidney R. Thomas and Eric D. Miller heard it with Stanley Blumenfeld, Jr., a district judge from the Central District of California sitting by designation. Argument took place in San Francisco on February 11, 2026. Judge Miller wrote the opinion, which runs to 18 pages and ends with a single word: affirmed. The dispute concerns Section 1202(b) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 provision that makes it unlawful to intentionally remove or alter copyright management information, known as CMI. The plaintiffs are programmers who published copyrighted code on public GitHub repositories under open source licences, and their complaint alleged that Copilot sometimes emits "essentially verbatim" copies of their code without those notices