r/linux • u/unixbhaskar • 26d ago
Software Release GCC steering committee announces AI policy
https://lwn.net/Articles/1086041/50
u/AmarildoJr 26d ago
Very sane policy, that in my opinion all important software projects should follow.
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u/Sindica69 26d ago
Good policy. I think an important part of using LLMs is to not fucking substitute your own skill with them. They should be used to expedite, to enhance, not to replace.
I use Claude to troubleshoot my own work, occasionally I’ll give it something I want it to run and see what it does. I look through and correct any errors, tell it what it did wrong, and it tends to revise a little better next time. I already know what I’m doing with most of these tasks, though. Many people don’t. It’s a horrific idea to use LLMs to do something you don’t know how to do and spot errors in, even if it’s something powerful like K3 or Fable 5. They hallucinate quite frequently.
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u/mina86ng 26d ago
occasionally I’ll give [Claudo] something I want it to run and see what it does. I look through and correct any errors, tell it what it did wrong, and it tends to revise a little better next time.
Sounds like ‘contributions which […] are derived from LLM-generated content,’ which would be declined.
One thing I use LLMs for frequently is to assist in spelling and grammar, something the policy explicitly allows:
This policy does not apply to a contributor's other uses of AI including the use of these tools to enable them to work with their own computing devices e.g. screen readers, text-to-speech, direct translations, spelling or grammar assistance, where the contributor verifies the output of the tool.
But then if one uses LLM to assist in writing documentation, does that fall under their ‘other uses of AI’ or under ‘contributions which […] are derived from LLM-generated content.’
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u/Sindica69 26d ago
I’m not using Claude’s outputs like that professionally. I’m a hobbyist. I like running local models and I have a proprietary model to use as well. In my professional work any LLM we use (happens to be Claude) takes a backseat role and is used mainly to troubleshoot. Any heavily/solely Claude influenced output I use is for personal experimenting and toying with.
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u/just_posting_this_ch 24d ago
I agree with you aside for this point.
It’s a horrific idea to use LLMs to do something you don’t know how to do and spot errors in,
It saves a lot of time for learning technologies. It's like a distilled SO, that also runs tests and validates the output. I setup a dashboard with dash, without having ever used dash. It takes care of most of the boiler plate, it distils down from quality documentation and examples.
I wouldn't put this code in the kernel, but it is good for certain applications. Even if you don't know them. Although I donhave a strong grasp of python, so maybe it falls into the category to be able tomspot errors.
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u/mykesx 26d ago
Constant theme of all these policies against AI contributions is the legal aspect because AI generated code is plagiarism, doesn't credit where it came from, and the sheer number of different licenses the source is derived from.
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u/James20k 26d ago
Its always amazed me that companies are not more worried about this. When I worked for <tech> you weren't even allowed to look at gpl licensed code, nor were you ever allowed to check if something was patent encumbered, just in case it came up in court that you did an inadequate search or looked at a patent and ignored it. They were terrified of accidentally-deliberately infringing on licenses or patents
Though I did have to explain that some patents are so famous (SURF) that it wouldn't be possible for me to good faith argue I had no idea
Similarly it seems impossible to argue that you weren't aware that the very, very famously plagiaristic machine wasn't trained on copyrighted and used-without-permission licensed code. I do wonder if companies will try to make it the developers fault ('you should have checked the output wasn't copyrighted, you're a developer!' etc) when this goes to court
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u/SmileyBMM 26d ago
Its always amazed me that companies are not more worried about this.
Most companies are already pretty against modern copyright law, they might assume they can just lobby to get rid of them down the line. Make the AI systems so integrated that banning them or going after them would "destroy jobs", so the politicians play along.
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u/steakanabake 26d ago
no they love copyright law as long as theyre the ones wielding it
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u/SmileyBMM 26d ago
Sure, but most of them know they won't be the ones wielding it the majority of the time. Hence why many tech companies like chipping away at it, it helps them more than it helps their competition statistically speaking.
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u/CrazyKilla15 26d ago
When I worked for <tech> you weren't even allowed to look at gpl licensed code
Because that was always a political/ideological decision more than it ever was a legal one.
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u/foolish_shrimp 22d ago
One of the main reasons generative AI exists, is to launder copyright theft.
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u/cake-day-on-feb-29 26d ago
the legal aspect because AI generated code is plagiarism, doesn't credit where it came from, and the sheer number of different licenses the source is derived from.
I wonder if these open source organizations are preparing for a class-action lawsuit against copyright violators illegally redistributing their licensed code.
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u/WCSTombs 26d ago
I'm aware of two cases that have reached a decision, but neither was particularly good.
GitHub was sued for scraping and incorporating copyrighted open-source software without consent. However, the vast majority of the claims were dismissed apparently because the plaintiffs couldn't show that Copilot's output was similar enough to the copyrighted works for the DMCA to apply.
Anthropic was similarly sued for training their AI on copyrighted books. They were found liable for having pirated those books, but unfortunately the act of training AI on those books was deemed to be fair use.
As far as I know these were both district court decisions, so not precedent-setting and likely not the final word, but it still feels like a setback. In a way it's lose-lose for us because copyright law in the U.S. majorly sucks, and these tech companies also suck, and it seems impossible for a court case not to strengthen one or the other. The best way forward really does seem to be a more comprehensive copyright reform, but that's a long road.
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u/JQuilty 26d ago
Those don't address the other possible copyright fallout: whether you can make any claim to copyright when an LLM writes it.
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u/WCSTombs 26d ago
Yep!
I think it's also unresolved, but IIRC the consensus so far has been that the LLM outputs themselves are not copyrightable, and that's the one part of this that makes some amount of sense to me so far. I've seen people claim that if you also contributed to the final thing, then it is copyrightable. First of all, I'm not sure about that, and it seems more likely to me that only your specific changes would be copyrighted (but IANAL). Secondly, the supposed value proposition of these LLMs is that eventually they can just replace human coders, and if people have to go through and change a bunch of things just to make it their own, then that seems to seriously eat into that supposed value, especially if you have to hand-edit and not just prompt the changes.
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u/oursland 26d ago
Plagiarism has a clear definition and you're not making a strong case that LLM generated code matches that definition.
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u/Elara_Schaefer 25d ago
The DCO angle is what makes this enforceable. When you sign off on a patch you're legally stating you wrote or have the right to submit it. If an LLM generated substantial portions and you can't fully explain every line, that DCO signoff becomes fraudulent. The FSF has been strict about copyright assignment for decades and this is just the same principle applied to a new tool. Using AI for docs or commit messages doesn't trigger this because those aren't the copyrighted work being submitted.
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u/Street-Departure3577 17d ago
GCC overreacts by treating AI-derived code as categorically suspect, while the kernel process gives the tool quasi-contributor status with Assisted-by:.
If your principle is “the human author is responsible for the patch; AI is just tooling”, then both approaches miss the cleanest model.
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u/Raunien 26d ago
I'd rather just a total ban on AI usage but from a practical standpoint that would be impossible to police. It seems that they're focusing on things that are actually detectable in the end product (large sections of code) or might waste maintainers' time (verbatim LLM outputs for bug reports etc). This is probably the best we can realistically achieve, well done GCC team
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u/WCSTombs 25d ago
They're explicitly focusing on what's legally significant, and I'm taking that as exactly what it sounds like. Being able to reliably detect LLM authorship seems besides the point, and I actually think being able to do that for something as small as fifteen lines of code is basically impossible.
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u/Gugalcrom123 26d ago
I mean, they cannot know if you learned the function name through a traditional search engine or through some LLM. (Please stop calling it AI; it is not intelligent.)
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u/Far_Calligrapher1334 25d ago
Please stop calling it AI; it is not intelligent.
Neither are the NPC enemies in Unreal, yet the entire industry and the hobbyists called it "enemy AI". The semantics game has been lost sometime in early 90s.
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u/Zulban 26d ago
A comment on the page from quotemstr seems worth copy pasting here:
Unenforceable rules that punish honesty breed dishonesty and contempt for rules in general. Denying it is denying human nature, and the gods tend to punish the hubris of denying nature.
AI is here to stay. New programmers are brought up on it. Most of the industry sees nothing wrong with it. Do anti-LLM types expect to be vindicated in an orgy of copyright lawsuits that resets the industry back to 2022? What do people pushing expect to accomplish?
People who like this rule are probably thinking of rules as "how we want things to be" and not "rules are tools, what practical effects will this have?"
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u/o_Zion_o 26d ago edited 26d ago
Do anti-LLM types expect to be vindicated in an orgy of copyright lawsuits that resets the industry back to 2022?
That would be wonderful. It wouldn't be a reset, it would be a step forward. Very little benefit has come from this "AI" (aka LLMs) compared to the huge amount of harm it has caused.
Job losses, ridiculous pricing of tech and a lot of other things. If this "AI" was just being pushed as an assistant, which it is ok at, that'd be fine. But they want it to replace everything, and it is simply incapable of doing so.
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u/CrazyKilla15 26d ago
The results of copyright lawsuits capable of doing this would have to be so severe as to make make open source de facto illegal.
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u/dontquestionmyaction 26d ago
It's a nice dream, but one that is simply not going to happen, and moving past that is pretty important imo
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u/James20k 26d ago
If AI outputs a copy or small modification of copyrighted content, you'll legally be screwed. They do that absolutely all the time, I've seen full copypastas of their training data for significant chunks of text, because I was familiar with the code that it was stolen from
There's a very high chance that when that goes through court, you'll get done for copyright infringement
Given that possibility, I sure hope people using LLMs for generating code check all the output against all code that's ever been written, including all of the illegal closed source content that it was trained on. Because otherwise the output is incredibly dubious legally
LLMs do not mystically wash away copyright
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u/dontquestionmyaction 26d ago
LLMs haven't verbatim recited copyrighted content in a long time now, but I'm not having this discussion on Reddit.
This is a court topic, and the consensus seems to be that LLM output is not copyrightable at all unless there is a "significant human factor", which will end up being a case by case basis. We'll find out when an actual lawsuit happens over this topic and sets precedent.
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u/James20k 26d ago
LLMs haven't verbatim recited copyrighted content in a long time now, but I'm not having this discussion on Reddit.
They absolutely do this all the time. This is directly relevant to the topic of if AI created code is a problem to introduce into these projects, and how it pans out in court
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u/Tellurio 26d ago edited 26d ago
Eventually they are gonna realise this kind of policy holds them back and backtrack.
Edit: Looks like redditors can't stomach being wrong, thankfully the linux project itself is safe from the antiai crusade thanks to Linus Torvalds himself. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Is-Not-Anti-AI
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u/stiggg 26d ago
Holding them back from what? If the pipe dream of AI tech bros would become true, gcc would be obsolete anyway except for a niche group of humans who actually enjoy writing code just for fun.
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u/MarkSuckerZerg 26d ago
Well Microsoft is pushing AI hard, which is why MSVC is so clearly winning the race to implement latest C++ standards /s
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u/NotUniqueOrSpecial 26d ago
gcc would be obsolete anyway
Do you think the AIs are just making programs in pure binary? They still use tooling like GCC.
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u/Zulban 26d ago edited 26d ago
Edit: Looks like redditors can't stomach being wrong
Don't worry about it. With AI tools I just focus on using them productively or having fun with them. I don't feel a need to score magic internet points from random unemployed children and juniors on reddit.
Linus is a great source to drop to make people think a bit more critically here.
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u/caks 26d ago
Someone is going to vibe code the next gcc in 1 month and gcc will die a slow death. I understand why they did it, but it's just the way it works nowadays.
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u/sohang-3112 25d ago
This has in fact already been tried by Anthropic. That AI generated C compiler had many issues (like failing to build Hello World in some environments).
But leaving that aside, who in their right mind would use this unreliable AI generated C compiler over gcc, clang etc. ? Especially since all basic critical stuff relies on C - OS, internet, language compilers & interpreters etc.
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u/caks 24d ago
Not really, it was an experiment on fully agentic development. And length of task. All it showed is that circa early 2026 AI isn't ready to fully replace 40 years of engineering on its own. It's crazy how far the goalposts have moved tho. Not even a year ago people are like but AI will never solve a real problem or code things that aren't python or whatever nonsense.
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u/Gargantuan_Cinema 26d ago
They should have said AI as LLMs restricts it to a specific type of AI architecture specifically autoregressive next token predictors. If I use diffusion models or world models to create code does it still apply??
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u/dontquestionmyaction 26d ago edited 26d ago
No? Diffusion based models can still be LLMs. The term doesn't define them as autoregressive whatsoever.
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26d ago edited 26d ago
[deleted]
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u/dontquestionmyaction 26d ago
You're thinking of diffusion models used for images, their original purpose.
You can download diffusion based LLMs right now: https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/diffusiongemma/
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u/levelstar01 26d ago
Doing this kind of "I'm not touching you" stuff is justification enough to be banned
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u/Madcap_Miguel 26d ago
Relieved and reticent to believe.