Every pitch in this market leads with "you own your IP". It is a good line because it names a real anxiety. It is also doing a lot of work for a sentence nobody unpacks.
I am an engineer, not a lawyer, and the paragraphs below are not legal advice — for anything that matters, get an actual attorney. But there are three distinct questions hiding inside "who owns it", and most founders only ever ask one.
Question one: does the platform claim anything?
The tools you built with — Lovable, Cursor, Base44, Claude Code and the rest — each have terms about what happens to the code you generate.
The good news is that the major ones broadly disclaim ownership of your output. The bad news is that disclaiming ownership is not the same as leaving you everything you need. Read for two other things:
Can you get the code out? Some platforms host your app and make exporting it anything from awkward to impossible. Code you cannot take with you is code you do not functionally own, whatever the terms say about title.
What are they allowed to do with it? Separate from ownership: licences to use, store or train on what you make. Often reasonable, occasionally not, and very rarely read.
Go and look at the actual terms for the tool you used. That is twenty minutes and it is the highest-value twenty minutes in this article.
Question two: can AI-written code be owned at all?
This is the genuinely unsettled one.
In the United States, copyright has historically required human authorship. The Copyright Office has been clear that purely machine-generated material is not protected, while work where a human contributed meaningful creative expression can be — with protection extending to the human contribution.
What that means for an app where you described what you wanted and a model produced the code is not fully settled, and anyone who tells you it is settled is overselling their certainty.
The practical read: do not build a business whose only defensible asset is the copyright in the generated code. In most cases the moat was never the code anyway — it is your customers, your data, your domain knowledge, the thing you know about this industry that made you start. Those are ownable in ordinary ways.
Question three: what about the developer you hand it to?
This is the one that actually bites, and it has nothing to do with AI.
If you hire someone to finish your app and the contract says nothing, the default in several jurisdictions is that the developer owns what they write, and you get an implied licence to use it. Not malice — just the default when nobody wrote anything down.
So whatever else you do, get these in writing before work starts:
- Assignment of all rights in the work to you, on creation, not on final payment — otherwise a payment dispute becomes an ownership dispute.
- A list of anything they are reusing that they will not assign — their own libraries, prior work — with a licence for you to use it forever.
- Admin access in your name. Hosting, database, domain, payment provider, repository. Owning the code and not controlling the accounts it runs in is a distinction you discover at the worst possible moment.
- What happens if it ends badly. You get the code and the data, in a usable form, within a stated number of days.
That last one is the real test of anybody you are considering. Ask how you would leave. Someone confident in their work will answer plainly.
The version I would actually worry about
Not the copyright question. The access question.
The founders I have seen genuinely stuck were not stuck over authorship. They were stuck because the hosting account was in someone else's name, or the database lived inside a platform with no export, or the only person who could deploy had gone quiet.
Ownership on paper is worth very little without the keys. Check the keys.
Run the free website check — unrelated to ownership, and a fair sample of how I work: it tells you specific true things and asks for nothing.
If you are about to hand a part-built app to someone, tell me what you have got. I will tell you what I would want in writing if I were you — including the clauses that protect you from me.
