GCC steering committee announces AI policy

The GCC steering committee has announced that it has accepted an AI contributions policy recommended by the GCC AI policy working group.

The policy, in part, states that the project will decline any " legally significant contributions which include LLM-generated content or are derived from LLM-generated content ". It uses the definition of "legally significant" from the GNU Project maintainer guidelines, which holds that the threshold is " around 15 lines of code and/or text " to qualify as significant for copyright purposes. GCC maintainers may, however, choose to accept legally significant test cases that are generated by an LLM.

The policy does not forbid use of LLMs for research, analysis, bug discovery and reporting, patch review, etc. as long as the output is not included in contributions. The committee says that it expects the policy will evolve and will be revisited periodically.

Rules Posted Jul 29, 2026 22:56 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [ Link ] (30 responses)

Of _course "industry sees nothing wrong with it" -- They will gladly fire every single worker that they think they can replace with a machine. Especially when said machine is still priced well below cost. Make no mistake, this is their ultimate goal. Why is anyone not surprised that some folks are not enthusiastically building their own gallows? "The true purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill without allowing skill to access wealth." Rules Posted Jul 29, 2026 23:31 UTC (Wed) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [ Link ] (29 responses)

Rules Posted Jul 29, 2026 23:38 UTC (Wed) by alx.manpages (subscriber, #145117) [ Link ] (28 responses)

If *you*, and possibly a reduced number of people, would willingly break the rules, that's up to you. But please don't insult everybody else. There are people that don't want to do anything with AI. And there are people that they wish they could, but respect the maintainers of the project, and thus avoid using it for the project. Rules Posted Jul 30, 2026 0:38 UTC (Thu) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [ Link ] (27 responses)

Fact is, the way people work, no-AI policies will produce covert AI use. You may not like it, but it's true, because it's human nature. It will continue to be human nature even if you accuse people who notice why people are bad of being bad themselves. "Reality is what's still there when you close your eyes". Since we're exchange Spanish wisdom, I'd encourage you to read what Cervantes had to say about noble self-deception. Rules Posted Jul 30, 2026 1:32 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [ Link ]

This isn't about the choices/actions of "everyone else", it's about the choices and actions *you* make for yourself. To a lesser extent, it's about sorts of folks you choose to voluntarily associate with. Sure, some folks lie, cheat and steal. Does that mean we all should enthusiastically emulate them? Rules Posted Jul 30, 2026 2:06 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [ Link ] (25 responses)

I seriously doubt that. I think it's much more likely that people who want to use AI just won't contribute to projects with no-AI policies. And as I wrote elsewhere... if someone does use AI covertly, it's extremely likely they'll be found out, blocked from the project, and that their reputation will suffer. This is the enforcement mechanism, just like a speeding ticket doesn't prevent speeding before the fact, but it tends to deter it after the fact. Rules Posted Jul 30, 2026 4:32 UTC (Thu) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [ Link ] (5 responses)

> extremely likely they'll be found out, Why do you believe these things to be true? Is it that you can tell something is AI slop by looking at it? What about non-slop AI outputs? You see the detection bias here, do you not? Rules Posted Jul 30, 2026 9:47 UTC (Thu) by alx.manpages (subscriber, #145117) [ Link ] (2 responses)

> > extremely likely they'll be found out, > Why do you believe these things to be true? Is it that you can tell something is AI slop by looking at it? Yes, I've been able to tell when contributors came with AI-derived contributions quite consistently. Since the policy had been there for a short time, and they weren't regular contributors, I assumed good faith and told them about it, and they admitted it, so it was all good. Some of them decided to not contribute to the project; others rewrote the patches from scratch, without AI slop. For non-trivial contributions, it's easy to tell when a non-regular contributor has used AI. It tends to make fundamental mistakes 2 lines away from having the same thing done perfectly, just too frequently. There's almost always (at least) a line of code that screams "AI". For trivial contributions, it's less easy to tell, but it doesn't matter that much. > What about non-slop AI outputs? You see the detection bias here, do you not? I don't believe "non-slop AI outputs" exist at all. I haven't seen it. Whenever that exists, I'll think what to do about it. But in any case, liars are likely to be one-time contributors. Regular contributors have a reputation, and the risk of losing it if it is found that AI was used, should be motivation enough to not use it at all. Even if the contributor is careful to check all the output to make sure it's not slop, it might make a mistake eventually, and uncover the fact that it's using AI. That would be terrible for the contributor. One-time contributors who don't yet have a reputation to care about might be more prone to lying, but in general, maintainers are more skeptic of such contributions, precisely because there's no established trust. Rules Posted Jul 31, 2026 10:26 UTC (Fri) by adirat (subscriber, #86623) [ Link ] (1 responses)

Most people will stop contributing, regardless of AI use, because this is turning into a witch hunt. Rules Posted Jul 31, 2026 11:08 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [ Link ]

Please. "Most people" will never bother/care to contribute in the first place. The goal here is not "ease of contribution above all else". If that's what you care about, then feel free to put your money where your mouth is and (1) allow full commit access to everyone+everything, and (2) daily drive the resultant slop. If that's not acceptable/good enough/whatever, leading to additional rules (=~ "some measure of quality") before accepting a random "contribution", congratulations, you prioritize something other than "ease of contribution". So why the objections to the rules that others come up with? Rules Posted Jul 30, 2026 14:28 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [ Link ]

No, they may not be found out on the basis of the code they write. But if they're asked questions about the code and they show they don't understand it, or it somehow slips out they've used AI, they'll be found out. In my experience, people who deliberately break rules are not the sharpest knives in the drawer, and they eventually slip up and get found out. Rules Posted Jul 31, 2026 23:28 UTC (Fri) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [ Link ]

Nobody who *doesn't* code with a chatbot worries that it's hard to tell. Rules Posted Jul 30, 2026 12:49 UTC (Thu) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [ Link ] (18 responses)

Probably that you haven't received enough ai-generated security reports then, otherwise you'd see that for a lot of such reporters, reputation is totally out of the equation, they're using randomly generated names as senders, and they don't care. There's a growing part of the population who has a very different perception of the one some of the older ones among us had. They're used to just create throw-away accounts everywhere, they don't even reuse them between two visits. They just live the instant and take the shortest path to get something done. If they need to create a discord account to report a bug, no worries, they click somewhere and a new e-mail address and account are created for this purpose, they report the bug and disappear. They've done their duty and that suffices. They will absolutely not care about being blocked, reputation nor whatever. They will not even read the rules that say "no AI contributions". They'll just adapt existing code to their needs using AI because that's how they work, then they will submit the patch hoping that someone takes it to relieve them from having to maintain it. If it's accepted, fine. If not, they won't care either. Anyway the week after they'll already be on something else. IMHO the real issue with AI contributions is the responsibility: who will respond to future bug reports? Such rules could be helpful in keeping such ephemeral contributors away, but it might hurt serious ones working in good faith. Rules Posted Jul 30, 2026 13:00 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [ Link ]

Trying to suss out the 0.1% of "good faith" in a sea of slop is not worth the effort. "Serious ones working in good faith" are only slightly more common than unicorns and honest politicians. Rules Posted Jul 30, 2026 13:14 UTC (Thu) by alx.manpages (subscriber, #145117) [ Link ]

If that user really cares about the bug they found (most likely, because it affects them), they'll do something about it. Otherwise, if it's not interesting for them, then the maintainers would do well just ignoring the slop. In any case, it's often easy to see that they used AI. Unless it's a trivial one-liner, in which it isn't as important (and GCC allows, it, FWIW). Dealing with a contributor such as those you described is something that is not interesting for a project like GCC. Contributors should be prepared to maintain their code, if bugs are found in it. I think this might act as a good filter against such contributions, as a side effect. Rules Posted Jul 31, 2026 0:13 UTC (Fri) by sionescu (subscriber, #59410) [ Link ] (15 responses)

Rules Posted Jul 31, 2026 7:53 UTC (Fri) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [ Link ]

Rules Posted Jul 31, 2026 18:33 UTC (Fri) by jwakely (subscriber, #60262) [ Link ] (13 responses)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato Rules Posted Jul 31, 2026 20:46 UTC (Fri) by alx.manpages (subscriber, #145117) [ Link ] (12 responses)

We don't need a centralized server for that. You can search for messages from that contributor in public mailing list, and if you don't find them, the contributor could point to links to those. The more and the older, the better. Rules Posted Jul 31, 2026 20:51 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax ( ✭ supporter ✭ , #52523) [ Link ] (1 responses)

Rules Posted Jul 31, 2026 21:26 UTC (Fri) by alx.manpages (subscriber, #145117) [ Link ]

Rules Posted Jul 31, 2026 20:56 UTC (Fri) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [ Link ] (9 responses)

Rules Posted Jul 31, 2026 21:24 UTC (Fri) by alx.manpages (subscriber, #145117) [ Link ] (7 responses)

It's slow, but there's no magic shortcut for building trust (other than maybe exceptions, such as meeting an old fart IRL in a job, maybe). Rules Posted Jul 31, 2026 21:39 UTC (Fri) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [ Link ] (6 responses)

:-) >The way to gain that reputation --IMHO, and how I did it-- is by contributing small patches Sure. That is how we all did it. But how to do this if you are blocked by a reputation barrier to begin with? Old key/account/whatever -> blocked. No trust. Must be an LLM idiot. This is not now society works. How do you build up? Why can't you use the tools you want to use? Why do certain tools automatically make you stupid or untrustworthy? This doesn't make any sense. Judge by the contribution quality, not by the tools. Rules Posted Jul 31, 2026 21:44 UTC (Fri) by alx.manpages (subscriber, #145117) [ Link ] (5 responses)

> Sure. That is how we all did it. But how to do this if you are blocked by a reputation barrier to begin with? > Old key/account/whatever -> blocked. No trust. Must be an LLM idiot. > This is not now society works. It's not black-or-white. Untrusted account: okay for small/trivial contributions; certainly not going to accept a major change. Gradually accept larger changes, if all goes well. It'