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…

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