AI Cloned Office and Adobe: Microsoft and Adobe at Risk

The inevitable has happened: a developer has released the source code and binaries of clones of Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite, created using AI. The code is written in Rust and claimed to be a clean rewrite, but functionality cannot be protected by copyright. The clones are in a pre-alpha state but with significant functionality – a clear demonstration of how productive AI can be where creativity is not required. Microsoft and Adobe are facing competition, and it is unclear whether there is a law against this.

Companies that trained AI on the largest intellectual property theft in history now require exceptional legal agility to prevent AI from encroaching on their own IP. The world after code cloning will be interesting: everything effectively becomes open source, closing significant revenue streams for large companies that relied on lock-in. The motivation to build alternatives from scratch may disappear – both in the open and closed segments. Moving products to subscription and the cloud, where no one can access the binaries, seems like an obvious answer, but AI can manage web interfaces and collect data – and that's enough.

Code cloning is just the latest instance where AI is so disruptive that it threatens its creators. Another is the "doom loop," acknowledged by Microsoft and OpenAI in internal memos: AI is taking away ad revenue that pays for content and stifling the data it relies on.

The main point of failure is money. Gartner says that the return on investment is insufficient for growth; SemiAnalysis forecasts capital expenditures by 2030 at $11 trillion and asks where they will come from. Neocloud startups without an investment rating are forcing Nvidia to guarantee the lease of unsold capacities – "balance as a service," transferring risk to rated companies. The residual value of old chips is also strange: they generate the same or more revenue than new ones. The answer to the question of where to get the money for AI to work as promised is simple: no one knows.