A few days after Linux kernel maintainers dropped the requirement to disclose AI use in kernel work, the moderators of Reddit’s r/opensource went the other way. Any project that “uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI” is no longer welcome in the forum, which lists close to 392,000 members.
Moderator Wolvereness laid out the policy in a post Saturday evening titled “Your tokens aren’t valuable: No more AI.” The post calls AI, “as it exists today,” incongruent with the community. By Sunday morning it had drawn roughly 1,180 comments, and much of the thread was critical.
The AI ban is only part of it
Most of the attention has gone to the AI clause, but the new submission criteria reach well past it. A project shared on the subreddit now has to be at least a year old and actively maintained, with multiple contributors (the post says “subjectively 3+”) and an existing community. School-style capstone projects like note-taking apps, PDF viewers and command-line music players are out, as are tools built for AI, with MCP servers named as an example. Projects still need an OSI-approved license.
Posters need an account at least a year old with significant Reddit activity. The moderators also say they can no longer take posts asking for maintainers or contributors, which closes off a common route for a solo developer looking for help with a new project.
The language rule has drawn some of the sharpest objections. “If you don’t speak English, you need to find a different community,” the post says, explaining that moderators “cannot distinguish between AI-written and AI-translated.” Nonprofits incorporated under 501(c) and several related tax designations, or their equivalents abroad, can skip the age and account minimums if they get approval through modmail before posting.
The moderator gave one reason for the strict approach: an estimated 20 messages a day from people seeking exceptions for what the post calls “slop projects and burner accounts.”
Enforcement comes down to judgment
When a commenter asked how anyone would decide that AI use is “obvious,” Wolvereness replied that there is no objective test. “The rule is written so that from a moderation perspective, we’re afforded discretion to remove as much ‘slop’ as necessary,” the moderator wrote.
The Verge, which reported the change Sunday, noted that commenters keep pointing to the Linux kernel, which now contains some AI-generated code. Read strictly, that could put projects built on it at odds with the rule. Linus Torvalds made his own position plain in the kernel mailing list thread behind the disclosure change: “We’re not going to make stupid rules that say “you can’t use tools for X”.”
Unhappy users have already split off. A new subreddit, r/TrueOpenSource, was created Saturday, and its founder pinned a complaint megathread for anyone upset about the rules or a ban. Wolvereness added an edit to the original post wishing the new forum well as “a great refuge for those affected by this policy.”
Some established projects drew similar lines a while ago. Gentoo’s council voted in April 2024 to forbid contributions created with the help of natural language processing AI tools, citing copyright, quality and ethical concerns, while still allowing packages for AI software. NetBSD’s commit guidelines treat code from tools like Copilot or ChatGPT as presumed tainted, and it can’t be committed without prior written approval from the project’s core team.
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