Is It Legal to Clone Photoshop With AI?

A small team has released PhotoCraft, a free, open-source stand-in for Photoshop built with heavy help from AI, and it's designed so anyone fluent in Adobe's menus and shortcuts can sit down and start working. If you pay for Creative Cloud every month, whether a project like this can legally exist shapes how many real alternatives you end up with.

ArtCraft is the suite behind PhotoCraft, which also includes VectorCraft for Illustrator work and FilmCraft as a Premiere Pro replacement. The project says it was built in a "clean room," and Devin Stone of LegalEagle walks through what that phrase means once lawyers get involved. One team studies the original program and writes down its behavior: what goes in, what comes out, and what each feature does. A second team that has never seen the original code builds new software from that description alone. Copyright covers the code a programmer writes and leaves the functions open, so if the wall between the teams holds, any similarity points back to function. PhotoCraft's documentation says it relied on public specifications and observed behavior, with no Adobe source code, shaders, or assets, and that its Photoshop file support comes from the format specification Adobe publishes. The app is still an early alpha, with reports putting it at roughly 25 to 30% of Photoshop's features.

The technique has a long track record. In 1982, Compaq split its engineers into those who had read IBM's BIOS and those who hadn't, and the clean group wrote a new one from scratch. IBM never sued, and the Compaq Portable helped start the PC clone business. Two years later, Phoenix Technologies turned the same method into a product, licensing its BIOS to HP, Tandy, and AT&T and even buying insurance against copyright suits. Stone points out that some of what ArtCraft's founders have said publicly sounds less like that model, including talk of reverse engineering Adobe's top tools with Claude and a claim of having "one-shotted" Photoshop. An AI agent that presses every button and recreates the results raises a question the Compaq engineers never had to answer: whether a model can sit on the clean side of the wall at all.

Much of PhotoCraft's appeal is that it feels like Photoshop, and the law has been fairly kind to that kind of familiarity. In Lotus Development v. Borland, the First Circuit treated the menu command hierarchy of Lotus 1-2-3 as a "method of operation," which copyright can't lock up. A concurring opinion argued that users invest real time in learning a program's commands, and giving a developer exclusive rights to them would reward the company for its customers' effort. Stone ties that reasoning to years of Photoshop muscle memory and to PhotoGIMP, a 2020 add-on that rearranges GIMP's tools and shortcuts to match Adobe's layout and has picked up nearly 18,000 stars on GitHub. Visual design is a separate question. Stone uses the Apple v. Microsoft fight over the Macintosh's look and feel to show where generic panels and toolbars end and protectable artwork, such as original icons, begins.

The cost of leaving Photoshop has been dropping on several fronts at once. Canva made Affinity free in late 2025, folding Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher into a single app. Krita ships with a Photoshop-compatible shortcut scheme you can switch on in its settings, and GIMP 3.0 arrived in March 2025 after years of development. Read alongside Lotus, the skill you've built in Photoshop is more portable than the software itself. Before you commit to any alternative, list the dozen shortcuts you reach for most, such as brush size, layer masks, free transform, and the healing tools, and check whether the new editor lets you assign them to the same keys. Run one real edit start to finish in the new app before you cancel anything.

Copyright is only part of ArtCraft's exposure. Independent creation is no defense against patent infringement, so even a flawless clean room offers no protection if PhotoCraft reproduces a patented method, and giving the software away doesn't change that. Patents generally run 20 years from filing, which leaves many of Photoshop's older tools free for anyone to copy. Live patents are more likely to cover newer features like Content-Aware Fill and the AI-powered tools, and PhotoCraft hasn't built those yet. The closer it gets to matching Photoshop, the more patent risk it takes on.

Stone's take on whether AI can keep a clean room clean is in the video above.