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." 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.

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.