Linux kernel contributors no longer have to say whether AI helped write their patches. "The Maintainers Summit reached consensus to deprecate the Assisted-by Tag," Nvidia engineer and kernel developer Sasha Levin wrote to the kernel mailing list. "Remove the documentation requiring it."
The rule was young. It was proposed in July 2025 and landed in the docs in January 2026, asking anyone who used "any sort of advanced coding tool" to add an Assisted-by line to the commit. Red Hat's Jeff Layton laid out the case for dropping it: not everyone follows it, it "basically serves as free advertising for proprietary LLM companies," and it's not clear why the project collects the info at all.
Not everyone agrees. Ideas on Board founder Laurent Pinchart said he wasn't happy removing the tag without another disclosure mechanism, arguing it sets expectations even if some people cheat.
Linus Torvalds answered him bluntly, suggesting a "new rule" banning compilers and editors from kernel work, then asking: "Do you not see how UTTERLY STUPID those kinds of rules would be?" His bar is that people "understand what they are doing," whatever tools they use. Hard to argue with, honestly. A disclosure line never caught a bad patch; reviewers do.
— via The Register