Former Coinbase Employee Accused of Code Theft for AI Project

Users have accused former Coinbase employee Matthew Duke Pan of stealing code and unlawfully altering another company’s license to create the AI project PearAI, according to Protos. 

Pan claims he earned $270,000 annually at Coinbase. He left, started working on PearAI, and secured $500,000 in funding from the startup accelerator program YCombinator (YC).

On September 29, the former employee of the American crypto exchange introduced an AI code editor.

I just quit my 270 000$ job at Coinbase to join the first YCombinator fall batch with my cofounder @not_nang.

We’re building PearAI, an open source AI code editor. Think a better Copilot, or open source Cursor. But you’ve heard this spiel already… ?⬇️ pic.twitter.com/nYeycRKRHm

— FRYING PAN (@CodeFryingPan) September 29, 2024

User X Jakob Finch criticized the firm for stealing the work of another editor — Continue.

For those who don’t know: PearAI stole code from https://t.co/XJSTk2qWc2 and passed it off as a startup they are ‘building’ and just got funding for it: https://t.co/Ztbc6N0qk7 YC should not support people who steal labor from the open source community and rebrand it!

— Jakob Finch (@doiftrue) September 29, 2024

“For those who don’t know: PearAI stole code from Continue.dev, passed it off as a startup they are ‘building’, and just received funding. YC should not support people who steal labor from the open source community and rebrand it!” he commented.

Social media also noted that PearAI unlawfully changed the license to a corporate one. Pan responded that the team is currently focused on development and unable to delve into legal matters.

> YC backed startup can’t be “bothered with legal”

This is insane https://t.co/IUwH68tUmz pic.twitter.com/V7KUZ9w9yu

— NIK (@ns123abc) September 29, 2024

YC founder Garry Tan defended Pan, noting that Continue used an open-source Apache license.

Don’t understand why people are dragging a new project when literally it’s open source Apache license and that’s *the reason* why open source is awesome https://t.co/Cw7vbmuyOv

— Garry Tan (@garrytan) September 29, 2024

However, he acknowledged that converting the license to a corporate one was a mistake, which has now been corrected. 

This is fixed now, that was clearly a mistake

— Garry Tan (@garrytan) September 30, 2024

The community placed a note on Pan’s post indicating the use of Continue’s code for PearAI. It was later removed. 

that community note goes hard holy shit pic.twitter.com/lDGzUI7jVl

— sankalp (@dejavucoder) September 29, 2024

The former Coinbase employee noted that he did not lie or omit information about forking Continue. The project’s developers have mentioned this publicly many times. 

hi Mckay, I’ve been following your content for awhile and appreciate everything you’ve been sharing. I’d like to say that we did not lie nor omit about our fork from Continue. We mentioned this many times throughout the past 4 months of building very publicly. The community note…

— FRYING PAN (@CodeFryingPan) September 29, 2024

Back in November 2023, former employees of Revolut, Coinbase, and Spotify announced the launch of a crypto wallet.