Ownership in the Age of A.I
What does ownership look like in this current age of A.I? My thoughts.
Oct 13, 2026 · @Arman
As many of you may already know, there is a growing trend of people using AI to “decompile” and “recompile” some of the most widely used proprietary software in the world. Examples include Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office, and to the new AnyPS5 project. It raises a question that I can’t stop thinking about: what does ownership look like in the age of AI?
The Subscription Model
Growing up as Gen Z, physical media was well on its way out. Netflix launched its video streaming platform in 2007, when I was only three. By the early 2010s, the pitch was simple: why pay close to $100 per month on cable, or pirate content off sketchy websites, when all you need is a couple of cheap subscriptions that give you what you wanted, whenever you wanted it?
That bargain didn’t last long. Catalogs vanished over licensing disputes, shows scattered across a growing list of competitors, and many people pay close to what cable cost across five or six subscriptions.
So, naturally as the incentives to procure content through legitimate channels wanned, people went back to piracy.
The one exception in my opinion is music. Spotify and Apple Music dominate the digital streaming platform when it comes to music, and have done so due to carrying nearly the entire catalog of content and offering competitive features such as lossless audio and Dolby Atmos.
However, the problem corporations such as Adobe and Microsoft have, is that productivity software doesn’t have that incentive.
What Are You Actually Paying For?
Content streaming platforms like Spotify and Netflix sell a constant flow of new content, but productivity apps sell a tool. Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop do roughly the same job this year as they did last year, so if the product is basically the same, what’s the point of subscribing?
I think that’s the question driving people to vibe-code/build these apps themselves. Adobe is the clearest and strongest example, its tools were once industry-leading, but it’s subscription pricing is hard to justify. Not to mention, in a world where they have a near monopoly on the professional creative tool software market, it prices out lower-income users and people in many parts of the world. Furthermore, canceling Adobe’s subscription has always been notoriously painful, the FTC sued Adobe in 2024 over hidden early-termination fees and its cancellation process.
Who Owns Your Work?
Imagine, you are a graphic designer whose entire portfolio lives in Adobe’s file formats, but you can no longer afford their subscription. Legally, your art/creation is still yours, however it’s locked in a format you’ve lost the keys to. If you can’t open your own work without paying rent, how much do you really own it?
Borrowing Has Always Been Part of Computing
Although this is news now because of the role A.I plays, none of this is new. AMD started out as a licensed second source for Intel’s early x86 chips, before they eventually built compatible processors of its own. Apple’s GUI interface drew on work from Xerox PARC, and in turn Windows drew on the Mac. Copying, reverse engineering, and reimplementing ideas has pushed the software industry forward for years, and it has also landed plenty of companies in court along the way.
What’s changed is who can do it, reverse engineering major software suites used to take a dedicated team of engineers. Not anymore, in this age of A.I tools, you can personally attempt a rough copy of software that Microsoft or Adobe spends millions to build and maintain.
To be completely clear, I am not endorsing piracy or “de-compilation.” Taking an idea and building your own version is this industry has always moved forward. However, decompiling someone’s code and redistributing it is a different thing, and highly illegal. But I understand why people have grown frustrated enough to try.
The Leopards Are Eating Their Faces
Of course, the irony is hard to ignore, large corporations that are leading the AI “revolution”, Microsoft and Adobe included, spent the last few years convincing us that AI would let anyone build anything. Now, people are using those same AI tools to rebuild their flagship products. OpenAI trained its models on huge amounts of text from across the internet, and then accused the Chinese lab DeepSeek of copying from its own models. It’s a textbook case of a phrase I’ve come to love “I never thought leopards would eat MY face.”
It’s tempting to cheer: watching a single individual clone and open-source Photoshop feels like the internet giving greedy corporations the middle finger. After years of predatory subscription models, I get it. But I believe the usage of AI in this regard deserves far more scrutiny than a feel-good moment.
The same tools that copy Adobe can also copy and steal credit from work of individual researchers and creative professionals. Last month, OpenAI announced that an internal AI model had produced a proof about the Navier-Stokes equations, a problem tied to one of math’s $1 million Millenium Prize Problems (Quanta). What seemed like a breakthrough in the field of mathematics, quickly turned into an interesting example of a potential case of plagiarism. Hours earlier, NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster accused OpenAI of going after the problem, only after learning about the progress he and his collaborator Levent Alpöge had made, and of following a suspiciously similar path (Futurism). While OpenAI admits its work was perhaps inspired by rumors of their progress, it still claims credit for the Navier-Stokes result, and the two sides tell different versions of what happened.
We may never know the full truth of what happened, and Buckmaster himself said he doesn’t know whether their data was used. But if cloning Photoshop feels good because Adobe “had it coming”, how do we feel when the people at risk of losing credit are mathematicians who spent years on a problem? I don’t think we should feel the same, our ethics can’t depend on whether we like the victim.
What Ownership Looks Like Now
For companies, I think ownership will come down to who can regularly offer users something new, personal, and genuinely useful that nobody else can. Honestly, that’s always been true, but if anyone can have what you’re offering, was it ever just yours?
Think about the “Happy Birthday” song, people sing it all over the world, and almost no one knows who wrote it. For decades, Warner/Chappell collected royalties on it, until a federal judge ruled in 2015 that its copyright claim wasn’t valid. It goes to show, holding a legal claim on something everyone can freely use/create is a fragile kind of ownership.
Taking this back to the IT space, some companies have figured this out. I’m coming into the world of IT where cloud infrastructure is the big rage. Back in the days, high volume purchases of physical media such as Microsoft Office suite and Windows server racks was the norm. But with the introduction of subscription and SaaS models, Microsoft pivoted their strategy for Microsoft Office. It introduced Microsoft 365, and leveraged features such as OneDrive storage, SharePoint, Copilot, and apps that work together. This is to say, the features it provided such as cloud storage, agentic AI models, and server management, were backed by bare metal, that they owned somewhere along that chain. Software companies such as Adobe don’t have that, which is why they kept charging rent on the tool itself, and that’s where I think it lost. I think we will see a gradual decline in pushing everything into the cloud/software, and see physical media make its return soon.
But that solution only works for companies. Microsoft can survive someone cloning Word because it has a huge bare metal infrastructure and cloud ecosystem, and millions of customers to fall back on. A researcher, an artist, or a writer doesn’t. For them, credit is the only ownership they have, and it’s something that AI is quietly wearing away.
So maybe ownership in the age of AI means two different things. For corporations/software companies, it’s earning loyalty for a product that justifies its price. For individuals, it’s being recognized for the work you’ve done. The market will sort out the first, the second is up to all of us, and especially people building these tools, to protect.
