Coinbase Ex-Employee Accused of Stealing Code for PearAI

A former employee of Coinbase faces allegations of copyright infringement by stealing code and employing ChatGPT to illicitly modify the licensing of another open-source AI coding firm to establish PearAI.

Matthew Duke Pan, who goes by the name “Frying Pan,” asserts that he earned $270,000 annually while at the crypto exchange before leaving to develop PearAI. Last Friday, Pan declared that the AI startup had secured $500,000 in investment from YCombinator’s startup accelerator program (YC).

Nonetheless, after Pan advertised PearAI at the YC event on X (formerly Twitter), users criticized the company for “stealing” the code from another open-source AI code editor, Continue.dev, and presenting it as their own.

One individual even alleged that PearAI was illegally re-licensed under an enterprise license. In response, Pan stated, “Dawg i chatgtp’d the license.” He added that he would adjust the license if issues arose and mentioned, “We busy building rn can’t be bothered with legal.”

The founder of YC, Garry Tan, came to Pan’s defense amid the criticism. He consistently stated that Continue utilized an open-source Apache license and expressed his confusion regarding the criticism faced by a new project.

However, the transformation of Continue’s Apache licensing to enterprise was repeatedly highlighted as illegal, leading Tan to change his position and acknowledge that the relicensing was “clearly a mistake,” which has since been rectified.

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During this timeframe, Pan’s X post received a community note alleging that PearAI “mass-replaced” all occurrences of ‘Continue’ with ‘PearAI’ and incorporated its code. However, this note was subsequently removed, and Pan has been engaged in damage control for the past day.

He described the note as “objectively false” and asserted, “We are way too open and honest for this slander.” Pan emphasized that PearAI’s GitHub “About” section clarifies it is a fork of VSCode and Continue, and he claims to have publicly credited Continue for several months on GitHub and in various YouTube videos.

Protos has attempted to reach Frying Pan for comments.

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