Linus Torvalds called AI rules 'idiotic'. Linux still asks for the tag

Twenty-nine minutes after Laurent Pinchart argued for keeping the kernel's AI disclosure rule, Linus Torvalds answered him on the Linux kernel mailing list. The 13 October reply was not about disclosure. It was a reductio: if AI assistance disqualifies your judgement, so does every other tool that does part of the work.

"I don't understand this whole idiotic concept of 'don't use AI for X'," Torvalds wrote. Contributors would have to submit assembler to prove they understand the machine, and write commit messages without an editor, because backspace hides typing mistakes. Then came the verdict: "Do you not see how UTTERLY STUPID those kinds of rules would be?" He closed the point: "So no. We're not going to make stupid rules that say 'you can't use tools for X'."

The rule was Assisted-by, a commit tag the kernel has asked for since January. Sasha Levin, a kernel developer at Nvidia, posted a patch removing it on 9 October, citing consensus at the Maintainers Summit in Prague. Coverage treated that as the end: The Next Web headlined its piece "as Linux drops its tag", and The Register reported the community "has agreed to stop asking coders to disclose" AI use.

Mainline has not dropped anything. On 19 October the kernel's coding-assistants document still said contributions "should include an Assisted-by tag" and submitting-patches still warned that failing to add one "may impede the acceptance of your work." The file history in Torvalds' tree shows no removal commit. Phoronix, alone, called it a plan that would "likely proceed" later.

Fifty-one deleted lines

Levin's patch is small: four files, 51 lines out, one in. The requirement disappears from two documents, from the Italian translation of one, and from checkpatch.pl, which had listed Assisted-by: among recognised signature tags. The patch changes nothing about prompt disclosure or testing.

Jeff Layton of Red Hat had argued earlier that not everyone follows the policy, that the tag "basically serves as free advertising for proprietary LLM companies", and that it is unclear why the kernel collects the information. That last reason survives contact with the thread: a tag most contributors can now honestly add stops discriminating between anything.

What the kernel asks for instead

The disclosure argument assumes the tag was the transparency mechanism. It was never the substantive one. A separate document, generated-content.rst, sets out what the kernel wants to know when "a meaningful amount of content" was not written by someone in the Signed-off-by chain: which tools were used, the input given to them, the prompts if the code came from a short set, which parts of the patch were affected, and how it was tested.

That document also grants maintainers room to act. They may reject a contribution outright, review it "at a lower priority than human-generated content", or demand that the submitter explain the code. A contributor who cannot defend a submission should not send it; if they do, "maintainers are entitled to reject your series without detailed review." None of that is in Levin's diff. The tag was the weakest version of disclosure on offer: one line, no prompts, no test evidence, no consequence attached.

The objection that went unanswered

Pinchart, a kernel developer and founder of Ideas on Board, raised the enforcement problem and dismissed it. "The SoB line is not enforceable either," he wrote, meaning Signed-off-by. "Very few of our requirements and assumptions can be enforced." A rule's purpose is not a compliance rate but a stated expectation, "telling what we want and what we don't want". He added: "I really don't get the unenforceable argument here."

Torvalds reframed the disagreement as psychology: what Pinchart was about "has nothing to do with 'expectations', and it has everything to do with your hangups." He did not engage the analogy, which is where the case is weakest. Signed-off-by is machine-checkable against the sender's address, which is why checkpatch.pl validates it. Assisted-by recorded a claim no script could test. Kees Cook put it more politely, calling the tag "as redundant as specifying what editor I use" and saying a real declaration belongs in the commit message body.

On r/LocalLLaMA, where a screenshot of the exchange drew more than 400 comments after it was posted on 17 October, one commenter, SirLouen, objected that Torvalds was "comparing deterministic compilers with non deterministic LLM output". It is the strongest version of the case against him, and it still does not rescue the tag: a nondeterministic tool is a reason to review output harder, not to collect metadata saying it exists.

Why volume decided it

The thread's centre of gravity was arithmetic, not philosophy. Lorenzo Stoakes, a kernel developer at Arm, wrote that the gap between submission volume and reviewer bandwidth is "the MOST CRITICAL issue we face", and that making reviewers answer every submitter would kill the project. He reported two people sending 1,000 patches in two hours, and later described working evenings and weekends on AI-generated submissions to the point of burnout.

Theodore Tso of MIT put the quality case plainly: "What we want is high quality contributions. If they are high quality, who cares if they are AI-generated or not?" He described the choice as load-shedding or burnout. PostgreSQL 19's slip is the same bottleneck in another project. Mark Brown and Shuah Khan converged on a cheaper filter than any tag: ask how the patch was found and tested. Khan said the question usually ends the conversation, because the answer is silence or an admission that nothing was tested.

Torvalds had conceded the cost a week earlier in Prague. At Open Source Summit Europe on 9 October he said AI "is improving our code base" and that he now really likes using it, then added that it "is also stressing maintainers out to the point that it's a problem". He said people are "jokingly saying that there are bots talking to bots, and it does actually happen".

None of this is a reversal. In July he wrote that Linux is not one of the "anti-AI projects" and that anyone who objects "can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away." The October mail applies that position to a specific rule, with a maintainer's exhaustion behind it. Jori Koolstra, who wanted some disclosure kept, noted where the line now sits: Zig chose to disallow LLM contributions, and "Linux is explicitly not going down that road."

What the removal does not settle

The kernel's answer to AI slop is now permission to ignore it, issued in a maintainer's mail rather than a document. That is a real policy change, with costs the thread acknowledged. Koolstra warned that the pipeline for finding maintainers weakens when a patch is no longer evidence of commitment, and invoked Hardy missing Ramanujan. Stoakes agreed the collateral damage is real and called the alternative worse.

Disclosure survives as advice rather than requirement, which is roughly where generated-content.rst already sat. The question is not whether the tag disappears but whether the replacement is ever enforced. The available test is the one Khan and Brown described: asking what was tested, and rejecting silence. Sashiko, the agentic review tool whose reports now land on the list, adds a checkpoint that does not depend on contributor honesty. Whether that holds up under a thousand patches a day is unmeasured.

Other projects cited in the coverage chose differently. System76 has banned AI-generated content from its COSMIC desktop, and NetBSD has banned AI-generated code since 2024, a stance The Register reports has brought in $120,282 in donations against a $50,000 target. Both are small projects. The kernel cannot make that trade, which makes its decision look less like enthusiasm for AI than a refusal to write rules it cannot staff.

Fifty-one deleted lines is a thin artefact for a fight this loud. The substantive change is one sentence from the top maintainer: understanding is what matters, and it has "very little to do with what tools they use." Everything else in the thread is an argument about how to check that understanding without reading a thousand patches a day, and nobody in it claimed to have solved that.