Linux Kernel Moves to Drop AI Code Disclosure Tag; Torvalds: Banning AI Tools Is an Utterly Stupid Idea

What happened

Sasha Levin wrote in a post to the Linux kernel mailing list: "The Maintainers Summit reached consensus to deprecate the Assisted-by Tag. Remove the documentation requiring it." The tag had required anyone submitting patches with "any sort of advanced coding tool" to add an Assisted-by: LLM [TOOL1] [TOOL2] trailer to the commit message.

Laurent Pinchart, kernel developer and founder of Ideas on Board, objected in an Oct 13 reply: "I'm not happy removing the tag without adding another mechanism for required disclosure." He argued that setting expectations has value even if some contributors ignore it.

"I don't understand this whole idiotic concept of 'don't use AI for X.'"

— Linus Torvalds (Linux kernel mailing list, Oct 13)

Torvalds added sarcastically that Pinchart should get a new rule of his own: no compilers for kernel submissions, hand-written assembly to prove he understands what the machine does — and no text editor for commit messages either. He wrote: "Do you not see how UTTERLY STUPID those kinds of rules would be? So no. We're not going to make stupid rules that say 'you can't use tools for X.'" He said his expectation of contributors is that they do their best and understand what they are doing — "and that understanding has very little to do with what tools they use."

Key facts

1. Tag history: Took shape in July 2025, entered the docs in Jan 2026; required flagging AI assistance on patches made with "any advanced coding tool"
2. Compliance data: About one in ten of 18,533 non-merge commits in Linux 7.3 through rc7 carried the tag (per LWN), though actual AI tool use is believed to be far wider
3. Rationale: Red Hat kernel developer Jeff Layton: not everyone complies, it is free advertising for proprietary LLM companies, and the point of collecting the data is unclear
4. Shift: Veteran maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, who earlier backed keeping the tag, now supports dropping it; at an August open-source summit he said "LLMs are good enough now"
5. Companion change: The proposal also removes the tag's handling in the checkpatch.pl script