Technology

The title of the article is extraordinary wrong that makes it click bait.

There is no "yes to copilot"

It is only a formalization of what Linux said before: All AI is fine but a human is ultimately responsible.

" AI agents cannot use the legally binding "Signed-off-by" tag, requiring instead a new "Assisted-by" tag for transparency"

The only mention of copilot was this:

"developers using Copilot or ChatGPT can't genuinely guarantee the provenance of what they are submitting"

This remains a problem that the new guidelines don't resolve. Because even using AI as a tool and having a human review it still means the code the LLM output could have come from non GPL sources.

Seems like a reasonable approach. Make people be accountable for the code they submit, no matter the tools used.

I am the c/fuck_ai person but at this point I have made peace we can't avoid it. I still don't want it to do artsy stuff (image gen, video gen) and to blindly use it in critical stuff because humans are the ones that should be doing it or have constant oversight. I think the team's logic is correct here, because there is no way to know if the code is from an LLM or a human unless something there screams LLM or the contributor explicitly mentions it. Mandating the latter seems like a reasonable move for now.

I'd still be highly sceptical about pull requests with code created by llms. Personally what I noticed is that the author of such pr doesn't even read the code, and i have to go through all the slop

AI is here, another tool to use...the correct way. Very reasonable approach from Torvalds.

Copilot? You mean the AI with terms of service that are in bold and explicit: "for entertainment purposes only"?

Which is why its in the title and not the article? EntertainBait?

Bad actors submitting garbage code aren't going to read the documentation anyway, so the kernel should focus on holding human developers accountable rather than trying to police the software they run on their local machines.

"Guns don't kill people. People kill people"

Torvalds and the maintainers are acknowledging reality: developers are going to use AI tools to code faster, and trying to ban them is like trying to ban a specific brand of keyboard.

The author should elaborate on how exactly AI is like "a specific brand of keyboard". Last I checked a keyboard only enters what I type, without hallucinating 50 extra pages. And if AI, a tool that generates content, is like "a specific brand of keyboard", does that mean my brain is also a "specific brand of keyboard"?

I get their point. If you want to create good code by having AI create bad code and then spending twice the time to fix it, feel free to do that. But I'm in favor of a complete ban.

Linux kernel being written by Microsoft's AI.

Ah, the solution that recognizes there's no way to eliminate AI from the supply chain after it's already been introduced.

“Yes to Copilot, no to AI slop”

Pick One

I agree. If AI becomes outlawed, it will simply be used without other people knowing about it.

This approach, at least, means that people will label AI-generated code as such.

Maintainers' only responsibility is to ensure quality and shouldn't have to check for rogue AI submissions.

Tho I still miss consistent fucking weather so year of the netbsd?

"yes to copilot no to AI slop" lol lmfao

There are so many reasons not to include any AI generated code.

https://sciactive.com/human-contribution-policy/#Reasoning

Ultimately, the policy legally anchors every single line of AI-generated code

How would that even be possible? Given the state of things:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3543507.3583199

Our results suggest that [...] three types of plagiarism widely exist in LMs beyond memorization, [...] Given that a majority of LMs’ training data is scraped from the Web without informing content owners, their reiteration of words, phrases, and even core ideas from training sets into generated texts has ethical implications. Their patterns are likely to exacerbate as both the size of LMs and their training data increase, [...] Plagiarized content can also contain individuals’ personal and sensitive information.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/01/ai-memorization-research/685552/

Four popular large language models—OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok—have stored large portions of some of the books they’ve been trained on, and can reproduce long excerpts from those books. [...] This phenomenon has been called “memorization,” and AI companies have long denied that it happens on a large scale. [...]The Stanford study proves that there are such copies in AI models, and it is just the latest of several studies to do so.

https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2025/landmark-ruling-of-the-munich-regional-court-(gema-v-openai)-on-copyright-and-ai-training

The court confirmed that training large language models will generally fall within the scope of application of the text and data mining barriers, [...] the court found that the reproduction of the disputed song lyrics in the models does not constitute text and data mining, as text and data mining aims at the evaluation of information such as abstract syntactic regulations, common terms and semantic relationships, whereas the memorisation of the song lyrics at issue exceeds such an evaluation and is therefore not mere text and data mining

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2949719123000213#b7

In this work we explored the relationship between discourse quality and memorization for LLMs. We found that the models that consistently output the highest-quality text are also the ones that have the highest memorization rate.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671

recent work shows that substantial amounts of copyrighted text can be extracted from open-weight models. However, it remains an open question if similar extraction is feasible for production LLMs, given the safety measures [...]. We investigate this question [...] our work highlights that, even with model- and system-level safeguards, extraction of (in-copyright) training data remains a risk for production LLMs.

How does merely tagging the apparently stolen content make it less problematic, given I'm guessing it still won't have any attribution of the actual source (which for all we know, might often even be GPL incompatible)?

But I'm not a lawyer, so I guess what do I know. But even from a non-legal angle, what is this road the Linux Foundation seems to embrace of just ignoring the license of projects? Why even have the kernel be GPL then, rather than CC0?

I don't get it. And the article calling this "pragmatism" seems absurd to me.

any resulting bugs or security flaws firmly onto the shoulders of the human submitting it.

Watch Americans and their companies pull some mad gymnastics on proportioning blame for this

Definitely not a big fan of it, but realistically speaking, it's here to stay. It is wise for them to govern and regulate it rather than outright ban it. Especially with a project as big as this one, people will try. Saying that the responsibility falls on the human is definitely the right move.

No point getting upset about this, it’s inevitable. So many FOSS programmers work thanklessly for hours and now there’s some tool to take loads of that work away, of course they’re going to use it. I know loads of people complain about it but used responsibly it can take care of so much of the mundane work. I used to spend 10% of my time writing code then 90% debugging it. If I do that 10% then give it to Claude to go over I find it just works.

This seems like an ill-thought-out decision, especially in a landscape where Linux should be differentiating itself from, and not following Windows.

The titular "slop" just means "bad AI generated code is banned" but the definition of "bad" is as vague as Google's "don't be evil." Good luck enforcing it, especially in an open-source project where people's incentives aren't tied to a paycheck.

Title is also inaccurate regarding CoPilot (the Microsoft brand AI tool), as a comment there mentions

says yes to Copilot

Where in the article does it say that?? The only mention of CoPilot is where it talks about LLM-generated code having unverifiable provenance. Reply