Linux kernel devs drop obligatory confession of AI tool usage

Despite previous controversies, it seems like the lords of Linux are warming to AI-assisted coding. The penguin's kernel community has agreed to stop asking coders to disclose whether they used bots to help with their contributions.

And Linux kernel supremo Linus Torvalds has made clear that he opposes "stupid" AI disclosure rules as long as people understand the code they're submitting.

"The Maintainers Summit reached consensus to deprecate the Assisted-by Tag," said Sasha Levin, a Linux kernel developer and engineer at Nvidia, in a message to the Linux kernel mailing list last week. "Remove the documentation requiring it."

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The policy had said that those using "any sort of advanced coding tool in the creation of [their] patch" should acknowledge that through the addition of an "Assisted-by" tag in the commit message.

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The AI labeling proposal initially took shape in July 2025. It became part of the documentation in January 2026. This was shortly after Torvalds said that he was fairly positive about vibe coding as a way for people to get into programming, but remained skeptical about its effect on software maintainability. Since then, he's warmed to AI tool usage.

AI attribution wasn't an issue when the generated code was obvious, buggy, and bad. But in the past year or so, AI coding agents started producing code that is of acceptable quality for the purposes of the Linux kernel community.

"LLMs are good enough now," said Greg Kroah-Hartman, a veteran Linux kernel maintainer, at the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit in South Korea in August. "They've gotten good enough to find bugs because LLMs, AI, are just pattern matchers and code is nothing but patterns in a specific format."

Cautious acceptance hasn't erased concerns about errors slipping through unnoticed, accountability, and coding agents reproducing copyrighted code. 

There's also still a stigma in some circles around the use of AI tools. Those who have spent years honing software skills, coding with limited assistance from tools, may disparage developers who don't understand the code they conjure with a prompt. Rapid change will do that – in the space of a few years, software production practices have changed drastically, and software quality, security, and maintenance practices have yet to fully adjust.

The leading makers of AI coding agents – Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and the like – are doing their best to promote AI-driven projects as better than anything a human developer could manage.

Yet even they differ in their AI attribution practices. Claude adds provenance messages by default, but Codex does not.

In fields such as advertising and art, content provenance can help assess misinformation and human creative input. For code, the focus tends to be more on functionality than form.

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In a prior discussion of the merits of the tag requirement, Jeff Layton, a Linux kernel developer with Red Hat, explained the rationale for reversing course.

First, he said, not everyone abides by the policy. Second, he said, "it basically serves as free advertising for proprietary LLM companies." And third, he said, "it's not clear why we want to collect this info in the first place."

Some kernel contributors still see value in the tagging requirement.

"I'm not happy removing the tag without adding another mechanism for required disclosure," said Laurent Pinchart, a Linux kernel dev and founder of Ideas on Board, in a mailing list post on Tuesday. "Without that, I can foresee submitters pushing back on the question."

Pinchart challenged the argument that AI labeling rules will just be ignored.

"What this is about is setting our expectations, telling what we want and what we don't want," said Pinchart. "There's still value in that, and I'd argue there's even more value now. There will be people who won't care, there will be people who cheat. We've always had those, we'll keep having them, and we'll keep rejecting their contributions. I really don't get the unenforceable argument here."

Linus Torvalds responded with an emphatic rejection of tool usage declarations.

He wrote:

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What you are about is something entirely different. It has nothing to do with "expectations", and it has everything to do with your hangups.

I don't understand this whole idiotic concept of "don't use AI for X".

Here's a new rule just for you: don't use compilers for any of your kernel submissions.

Because if you can't show that you really understand what the machine is actually doing by writing your code in assembler, then I don't want to see your code contribution. You clearly aren't competent if you can't write it that way.

And btw, you had better not use an editor to write that commit message either.

Because I need you to show me that you can actually write a good commit message without using tools that make it easy to backspace and hide the mistakes you made while typing.

Ok?

Because otherwise those tool-assisted commits of yours clearly aren't showing that you know what you are doing.

Do you not see how UTTERLY STUPID those kinds of rules would be?

So no. We're not going to make stupid rules that say "you can't use tools for X".

The kind of expectations *I* have is that people do their best and I expect people to understand what they are doing.

But that understanding has very little to do with what tools they use.

And quite honestly, in my experience, the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools. ®