Qwen Code Ditched Google 10 Months Ago. Why Do 1,110 Files Still Say “Copyright Google”?

Author(s): Chew Loong Nian – AI ENGINEER Originally published on Towards AI. I checked every one of them against every blob Google’s Gemini CLI has ever committed. The header is still literally true for 58. I was reading Qwen Code’s source last night for an unrelated reason — I wanted to see how it routes a tool call to a non-Qwen provider — and I opened a file about a memory connector. The first thing on the screen was a copyright notice. It said Google. The article tests whether Qwen Code’s many “Copyright Google LLC” headers actually reflect code provenance. After finding that specific files appear to be “signed” by Google, the author designs a rigorous audit: first, classify which headers each TypeScript file carries; then verify the header claim by checking whether each file’s exact bytes (git blobs) ever appear in any commit of Google’s Gemini CLI history, avoiding confounds from post-fork edits and filename/path changes. The analysis is broken into buckets (verbatim byte-identical copies, edited at the same path, moved/edited, and “never upstream” cases), and it’s extended by weighting results by line counts and running the reverse direction to ensure there’s no Google code hiding under Qwen headers. The key findings are that only 58 file copies (5.2%) remain byte-identical to Google in the relevant window, and only 0.8% of lines under Google headers are truly Google bytes; moreover, the “mem0” connector’s files are not found anywhere upstream despite being labeled. The author concludes that copyright headers are mostly sticky boilerplate rather than reliable provenance, since tooling and reviews enforce the presence of the block but don’t ensure it’s updated or checked against actual authorship, and the result is a practical warning to run this kind of byte-level audit on vendored/folkor derivative code before trusting header-based attribution. Read the full blog for free on Medium. Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming a sponsor. Published via Towards AI