Linus Torvalds

On 14 July 2026, in a linux-media thread about an LLM tool for maintainers, Linus Torvalds, creator and principal maintainer of the Linux kernel, set the project's official position: Linux is not an anti-AI project. Roman Gushchin had flagged a very anti-LLM stance in an adjacent message; Torvalds agreed with the reading but refused it as the kernel's line, telling anyone who disagreed to fork or leave.

His argument separates two questions. Whether AI is useful is closed: anyone who doubts it has not really tried. What the economics of AI eventually look like stays open. He grants the costs instead of denying them. LLM output can be painful for maintainer workload, and it keeps finding embarrassing bugs. The prescription is to make the tools help maintainers rather than hurt them.

Three months later the same reasoning retired a rule. The kernel community deprecated the Assisted-by tag, proposed in July 2025 and written into the documentation in January 2026, which asked contributors to flag advanced coding tool use in their commit messages. Laurent Pinchart would not drop it without another disclosure mechanism. Torvalds answered that this was a personal blocker dressed as an expectation, and offered to ban compilers next, since only assembly would prove you understood the machine.

He asks instead that contributors understand their own code, which he holds to depend little on the tools used. Underneath both messages sits the same frame: the kernel decides on technical merit, and the social side of open source is a secondary benefit, not the goal.