There’s so much to unpack here, but let’s say I grant your premises that AIs are equivalent to people and Claude is making its own decisions about the project and the OG maintainer has ceded control of the repo to Mr Claude.

I don’t, but let’s assume for a moment.

It’s still up to the current maintainer to pick additional or replacement maintainers, and it would be bonkers to expect the new maintainer to fork the repo to implement their changes.

Open source projects change their maintainers all the time.

It depends on the circumstances. Maintainers can do whatever they want, theoretically. Practically, there is implicit community involvement, otherwise a project dies as people abandon it. Right now it isn't even acknowledged what is happening.

I think you may be confusing popularity with existence.

The thing that makes a project die is if the maintainers all leave. Users don’t make a project exist. They make it popular.

If the user community all up and left, rsync would still exist and continue as long as its maintainers choose to work on it.

By contrast, if all the maintainers leave because they’re tired of dealing with assholes, the project dies.

By that account an open source project never dies because the code is there for anyone to improve upon. Why does anyone care if one particular repo realization of some useful idea or its maintainers are around or not?

It's quite some value judgment and worldview to divide open source into autistic maintainers who do even if no one uses and asshole users who do not and cannot do.

Woof. I think we’re just not going to agree.