[squirtle24]

My guess - the app's users uploading university course material to a third party is likely a violation of school rules. Emory IT disabled the button to generate Canvas access tokens, and the 'workaround' the kid developed in response caused the IT folks to escalate.

An LLM trained on course material could in theory be used to generate homework answers, so they wanted to shut it down before it actually happens. (Hell, the demo question on their website[1] sounds taken straight from a problem set) It would be as if the answer key to the homework leaked, except its for every homework in every course. The punishments are to discourage others from building clones. Though I suspect this is going to cause a Streisand effect.

[1] https://www.eightball.ai/