Former Coinbase employee accused of ‘stealing’ code for PearAI

A former Coinbase employee has been accused of stealing code and using ChatGPT to illegally change the licensing of another open-source AI coding firm to create PearAI.

Matthew Duke Pan, known as “Frying Pan,” claims to have made $270,000 a year working for the crypto exchange before quitting to make PearAI. Last Friday Pan announced the AI firm had secured $500,000 in funding from the startup accelerator program YCombinator (YC).

However, after Pan promoted PearAI 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 relicensed PearAI to an enterprise license. In response, Pan said, “Dawg i chatgtp’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, Garry 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 Continue’s Apache licensing to enterprise was repeatedly called out for its illegality and Tan has since changed his stance, noting that the relicensing was “clearly a mistake,” and that it has been fixed now.

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Pan’s X post received a community note over this period that said PearAI “mass-replaced” all references of ‘Continue’ to ‘PearAI’ 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 PearAI’s GitHub “About” section states it is a fork of VSCode 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. 

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