Open Source’s Anti-AI Sentiment Has Real Reasons, and So Does The Other Side

A request to ban AI-written code from ImageMagick stayed open for about eight months, until a maintainer closed and locked it this week because it had largely run its course and moved into a broader ideological debate.

Around the same time, a developer on X was telling followers to join the pushback.

Days earlier, Asahi Linux began moving its code from MIT to GPLv2 after finding that people were lifting its unreleased work and, in some extreme cases, having an LLM rewrite it to hide where it came from.

AI in open source has turned into something people pick a side on. Many have grown to dislike it, and the reasons are easy enough to see.

Others back it to varying degrees, and the more grounded among them make a case that holds up too.

With this piece, I want to go through the first group’s complaints, then the louder end of the other camp, and then the careful argument for supporting AI.

Why so many are fed up

The most common complaint is review burden. Rust’s LLM policy announcement said a clean, tested PR used to be good evidence that its author had put in real effort and understood the change. LLMs, it says, have broken that link.

It also calls pasting reviewer comments into a chatbot and the reply back onto GitHub, a waste of time for both sides.

cURL hit the same wall, but from a security perspective. The project ended its bug bounty at the end of January after the share of reports that were real vulnerabilities dropped, and AI-generated slop became the majority.

The project’s lead, Daniel Stenberg, said that the constant slop wore the team down.

Codeberg, whose members voted 358 to 144 in July to stop hosting projects that are mostly AI-written, cited crawlers straining its servers, spiraling storage requisition costs, and one-person projects eating resources similar to large community ones as its motivating factors.

Then there is the legal worry. Asahi’s LLM policy says an LLM can break the rules that keep reverse engineering work clean. The risk grows when an AI agent does the digging and the human cannot see how the knowledge was obtained.

Codeberg’s Terms of Use call the copyright status of AI-written projects unclear. GCC says no to legally significant contributions that involve LLM output, with test cases as an exception. Legally insignificant ones can go in if clearly marked.

Trust and principle come into it too. Asahi’s policy lists wider harms, including to the environment, privacy, user consent, and software developers themselves.

Rust’s announcement says pasted LLM text leaves a reviewer wondering whether anyone is on the other end at all. Codeberg adds that people who put real effort into analyzing issues or sharing suggestions are being accused of using an LLM when they did not.

Even Linus Torvalds sees where the anger comes from. He told The Register that AI-found bugs piling work on maintainers and patches from people who do not understand the code are both real problems.

He understands why people come to dislike or even hate AI because of them, but he does not think AI itself is the issue.

The last entry on the no list is r/opensource. That is a subreddit, not a project. A moderator wrote that projects that use AI, are built with it, or are aimed at it are not welcome there, and said AI as it exists today does not fit the community.

Not everyone is staying calm

Not every supporter of AI is making a grounded case. Developer Vittorio Romeo accused an “anti-AI cult” of harassing and pressuring projects such as cURL and ImageMagick into banning LLMs and asked followers to join the pushback.

The threads that post links to are filled with some drama. The curl discussion opened in March with a long, sourced list of worries about plagiarism, code quality, and legal risk. Daniel Stenberg replied the same day that curl could not accept a ban on everything LLM.

The ImageMagick request (linked earlier) started from one merged commit that used Claude Opus.

The ImageMagick thread did get heated. Some anti-AI commenters were dismissive and insulting, and Vittorio’s own reply there accused them of ad-hominem attacks.

Peter Steinberger of OpenClaw fame also chimed in, saying that reading some of the comments made his brain hurt and that open source is hard enough without politics.

The grounded yes

Daniel says ignoring AI is not a sound approach since brushing off a real vulnerability because an AI found it puts users at risk. He says the onslaught of slop has mostly dried up since spring, and recent AI-assisted reports have been high quality, if wordy.

Debian’s approved resolution stays neutral on the tools and asks contributors to read, test, and understand AI output before submitting it. The kernel’s guidance is similar, with the human submitter accountable for the code.

Rust’s policy accepts LLMs for answering questions and reviewing work, bans LLM-created comments, docs, and diagnostics, and allows LLM-written code only under a disclosed experiment.

It also says harassing someone for using an LLM is not okay.

What Debian and the kernel share is a named human who answers for the change. That answers the review burden well, but not Asahi’s clean room problem, and the values complaints sit mostly outside what a policy can reach.

Closing thoughts

None of these approaches are final. GCC says it will review its policy by the start of 2027, Rust expects to change its policy as it learns how LLMs are used, and Debian’s statement can evolve without another vote.

That leaves contributors needing to consult a wide range of rulebooks for every project they send a patch to. Annoying, but this is what an unsettled debate looks like. 🤷