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.