Tech Analysis

AI Cloned Photoshop in Days. Can Adobe Sue?

October 2026

In early October a developer named Brandon Thomas published ArtCraft, seven free, open-source apps that copy the look and behaviour of Adobe's best-known software: PhotoCraft for Photoshop, VectorCraft for Illustrator, FilmCraft for Premiere Pro, and four more. He built them in Rust with Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5. PhotoCraft passed 20,000 GitHub stars in about a week, and it is still an early alpha. This piece isn't a review. It's about the two questions the project raised: can Adobe sue, and what happens to software if anyone can copy it this way?

What is claimed, and what isn't verified

The claim. PhotoCraft's README calls it a clean-room reimplementation, "implemented from public specs and observed behaviour only", with no Adobe code, shaders or assets. PSD support follows the file-format specification Adobe published.
The gap. No third party has checked that claim, and we couldn't find a detailed public account of how the AI agents studied Photoshop. The open-source veteran Eric S. Raymond publicly speculated that the code was decompiled first; the README says otherwise. Whether it counts as clean-room in law depends on facts outsiders can't see.
How far along. By the project's own scorecard, features exist in some form for roughly 60 to 70 percent of Photoshop, while real parity for daily professional work is below 50 percent. That is why you'll see both figures quoted.
Adobe. In the coverage we found, up to mid-October, there was no public statement from Adobe and no reported legal action. Silence isn't clearance: a lawsuit can follow long after the headlines.

Can Adobe sue?

Anyone can sue. Whether they'd win depends on what was copied, and each legal route works differently. This is a map, not advice, and the answers vary by country.

Copyright. It protects code and creative assets, not ideas, functionality or file formats. In SAS Institute v World Programming (2012), the EU's top court held that a program's functionality, programming language and data file formats aren't protected. In Google v Oracle (2021), the US Supreme Court found Google's copying of Java interface declarations was fair use, and in Sega v Accolade (1992) a US appeals court said disassembly to reach unprotected elements could be fair use. Copying icons, text strings, default presets or code fragments is a different matter.
Contract. Licence terms often ban reverse engineering. In the UK and EU, some rights to observe and test how a program works can't be removed by contract. US courts have been less consistent. If anyone ran a licensed copy of Photoshop to test it, the licence terms matter.
Patents. A clean-room process doesn't avoid them. Coverage notes that Adobe holds a large number, and a clone can be independent in code and still infringe a patent.
Trademark and look. Names and logos are protected. Menu layouts and shortcuts mostly aren't, as such. ArtCraft uses its own "Craft" names, but a tagline like "if you know Photoshop, you already know PhotoCraft" is the kind of line a lawyer would read closely.
Circumvention. Breaking licence checks or encryption is a separate legal route, and game emulator disputes have often turned on it. Nothing we've seen says PhotoCraft did that.

What AI changes about the question

The clean room. The classic version splits two teams: one studies the product, the other writes the code, and they never share material. With an AI agent, one system can do both, and the model itself was trained on a huge amount of code of mixed origin. Courts haven't settled whether that weakens a clean-room defence.
The cost. Building took days, not years. Legal doctrine grew up when copying a big program was expensive. If it becomes cheap, expect more disputes, not fewer.
The evidence. In a dispute, records of what the agent was shown and what it produced would matter a great deal. Most projects aren't keeping them.

If every program can be copied

Nobody knows, but there are four broad paths, and the real outcome is likely a mix.

Open. The law tolerates black-box copying. Features become a commodity, and competition moves to data, trust, support and distribution.
Locked down. Vendors move logic to servers, sell only subscriptions and tighten contracts. Copying gets harder, but users lose local control.
Legal tightening. Courts or lawmakers treat AI-assisted copying as infringement. Big projects get stopped, and small developers go quiet.
Muddle. Case-by-case fights that take years. Meanwhile the clones stall on the long tail: PSD files that don't round-trip, crashes, odd edge cases.

The last point is why this isn't the end of software. Copying a screen is cheap. Matching decades of edge cases, plugins and file compatibility is not. The expensive part moves, it doesn't vanish.

Who feels it most

Consumer software, most likely. Switching is easy, there is no procurement process, buyers are price-sensitive, and a user who copies for personal use is practically impossible to pursue. Companies buy something different: contracts, support, integration and someone to hold responsible. Those are hard to copy, so business software is likelier to feel pricing pressure than disappearance. Small single-purpose consumer tools are the most exposed of all, because the features are easy to copy and there is no network effect to protect them.

Where that leaves small developers, including us

Any iPhone app can be downloaded and examined, so ours can be copied too, and a copy could be free. We don't have a clean answer. A one-off price or a feature list isn't a moat. What we think holds up is behaviour anyone can verify, steady maintenance, and a named operator who can be held to account. That last part cuts both ways: if an app's privacy claim can be checked by reverse engineering, it had better be true. Our own guide to checking what an app uploads uses the same idea.

What to watch

Any statement, takedown notice or filing from Adobe.
Whether the project publishes how its agents studied Photoshop.
Whether PSD round-trip problems and crashes shrink over the coming weeks.
Whether other projects copy other commercial apps the same way.

Sources

For disclosure: we make iPhone apps and have an interest in how software copying plays out. We are not lawyers, and this is general information, not legal advice. The cases named above are examples of the kinds of argument involved, not a prediction of how any dispute would end.

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